The big question with social media is can it deliver ROI? 

While it may be difficult to monitor this and allow you 100% confirmation that social media is delivering a profit for your business, there are some positives to social media.

1) There are great savings advertising through Social Media. Even if you pay someone to update your Social Media Accounts frequently it would only cost you about $1/interaction. 
        . it costs about $6/phone call and $5/email
2) It has been proven that Social Media can reward you with about $2 profit for every "click" you receive through interaction. A follower will only result in about $0.01 return though. This reinforces that not only do you need to be speaking to your audience, but you need to be engaging them to really see a return for profit.

To reach your target audience on Social Media Platforms you need to understand the customer mind, which takes 5 steps in the conversion process to your product. These 5 steps are:

aware - recognize - associate - quality - likeability

While we can talk about how great Social Media is for advertising, I believe the ultimate goal of Social Media at this point is to bring online interactions offline. Yes, you can make a sale online, but odds are the customer is still going to want to meet you and talk to you before choosing your product. If you portray yourself well online and lots of people are talking about you then your name will get out there and you will achieve many more opportunities for face-to-face interactions, and as a result, sales. 

One other thing to keep in mind when comparing Social Media advertising to other advertising avenues is that so many people are asking for concrete numbers on the ROI of Social Media, but what they aren't realizing is that the numbers fed to them about TV ads or newspapers ads, etc. are being produced by TV and newspaper excutives. They are often just numbers being fed to you by the seller. There is no more or less guarantee on sales if you choose the Social Media route. But it has been proven if you spend the time and effort doing a good job on your Social Media campaign it can provide great returns for your company.