As social media has evolved from a fun thing college students did in the margins of their days to a means of keeping the entire world in touch with one another, the need for businesses to get involved has also grown.

Many companies are turning to web consultants and social media experts to help give their product or brand an online presence, and a large chunk of them do so without completely grasping how it can or will specifically help their initial return on investment. If you are going to be entering the highly competitive and crowded arena of social media marketing, here are three basic bottom-line objectives you should plan to achieve.

Attain New Customers
The general idea is that social media subscribers and followers will turn into customers, creating ROI for the business and getting the word out to folks that may have otherwise never been exposed to the information. While it is not a guarantee that every online follower of a business or brand will make regular purchases, increasing a Facebook or Twitter following by even a few hundred folks can mean thousands of dollars of new revenue over the course of one year.

Make Average Purchases Larger
When people are just discovering a business for the first time, they are often apprehensive about making large purchases. Once a person has opted to subscribe to or follow a business, the business then has constant and immediate access to relay messages or sales information they want to as long as it’s important to the customer. Having an online relationship with your customers allows them to get a thorough understanding of the type of business you are running and the extent of your offerings, meaning that they are much more likely to feel comfortable making a large purchase.

Increase Number of Transactions Per Day
Increasing your business’s online presence and exposure leads to increasing customers, and increasing customers leads to increasing the average number of transactions per day. If a business is successful in the first of these three tasks, the other two are entirely possible, if not probable. In short, figuring out a way to best utilize social media for your business is an essential part of doing business in the modern marketplace.

Before investing time and resources in social media, we recommend identifying and researching the available opportunities to determine the most effective plan.  Our Insight Lab offers a unique way to explore options, analyze ROI, and formulate a custom social media strategy.

Steve Schmidt is Owner and Web Strategist of Effect Web Agency in Elkhart, Indiana. Steve guides clients in planning their web strategy. This usually requires understanding their sales and marketing processes, the target audience, real-world business constraints and seeing the whole process work together as a machine.