I get this question a lot, even over this past weekend when I served on a social media panel at the annual conference for the International Association of Chiefs of Police.

Here’s the deal, social media is still proving itself in hard numbers but intuitively most of us recognize that the social media revolution has opened up new avenues for how we relate and build relationships with our constituents.

For those who need to be able to offer up a good “why” for investing any marketing budget into social media and have a hard time remembering all the benefits, use this business vernacular with a twist: Reach; Online engagement; and Insight (or ROI to help you remember it).

ROI for Social Media

Reach is fairly self explanatory, social media will help you reach your target audiences either directly or through the online grapevine. Social media can help you reach your audience for the first time or multiple times. Naturally that reach can be measured by the number of members in your network (often called followers, friends or fans).

Online engagement is a critical cornerstone to the social media culture since this culture highly values being heard (i.e. dialog over marketing monologue). Online engagement means being willing to take risks, like allowing people to comment on your content, your services, products, mission and anything else that may attract their attention. Sometimes you’ll have to agree to disagree, but it’s usually a good and healthy thing in the social media world and it generates a sense of relationship. Online engagement can be measured in terms of traffic to your primary site from the social media platform, comments and of course the overall growth in the size of your network.

Finally, insights about audiences— the lifeblood that drives all strategic marketing. By using social media we have the opportunity to do a unique kind of observational research. We can observe so many things about our audiences including their conversations, their topics and their level of passion around those topics. Sure, at first it can look like unorganized chatter but as you spend more time with social media, learn the networks’ search tools, try some new applications and interact with those in the social network you’re building, you will get better at distilling the input into insight.

Happy networking!