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Social Media consists of a myriad of means in which the interactions among people using web-based tools and platforms creates online virtual communities centred on user input and the sharing of information. Social media features anything from content-sharing to collaboration, and can take the form of platforms such as microblogging, forums, bookmarking sites, social networks and wikis. Prominent examples of social media include websites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Reddit. Social media is not only used for personal uses but is now playing a growing role in business and organisations; with entrepreneurs increasingly looking towards social media platforms to market their businesses. It is evidently becoming the case that investment in social media (“is a necessity, not a luxury” ), it is a fundamental instrument which should be used in any marketing plan. However, it is clear that business owners encounter various challenges with respect to investing in social media; they may face lack of time and knowledge on how to determine the return on investment (ROI) as an example; this is a recognised measurement to evaluate the efficiency and financial consequences of an investment and to ultimately assess the profitability of a business. == Return on Investment (ROI) == ROI refers to the money that a business or a corporation earns as a percentage of the full value of their assets which have been invested. The method to calculate this is: ''Return on investment = (Income - Cost) / Cost''. ROI is the most common profitability ratio that establishes the efficiency of an investment. In this context, ROI will measure the returns from a social media investment. However, it is commonly argued that calculating ROI is difficult and also depends on the applied returns and costs. There is no universal way of measuring the ROI of the social media commitments (Kelly, 2012). As such, some business owners tend to count how many Facebook fans and Twitter followers they have or how many retweets and likes they enjoy.〔http://www.forbes.com/sites/christinemoorman/2013/05/21/measuring-social-media-roi-companies-emphasize-voice-metrics/〕 However, this may not be an effective measure of ROI. We can measure ROI using metric tools that foster conversion measurement and optimized CPM, which enables Facebook ads to reach the target audience (Burg, 2013). This enables the investor to know who clicked through their ads thus enhancing future business planning. In addition, we can measure ROI by analyzing interactions, calculated by multiplying the number of received likes by the number of friends of those likes witnessed the action. This defines how far the advert went; moreover, we can analyze traffic to determine the ROI in social media efforts (Harden & Heyman, 2011). Indeed, different social media understand the business owners need to evaluate their ROI in social media and thus there is a provision for built-in analytics tools for following engagement, likes, and shares (Burg, 2013). This helps the marketers to determine how often people find the marketer’s page through the social sites. For example, on Facebook, one can analyze the comment to like a ratio of posts while on Twitter, one can analyze the retweets to tweet ratio. Notably, the higher the ratios, the higher the ROI is. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Investment in social media」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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