Social media marketers always have faced problem of scalability of the social media campaigns. Merely buzz monitoring or number of followers no longer convinces investors to set up a separate budget for social media marketing as an independent channel. Business and marketing channels are all about ROI and social media can not be an exception.

Recent study by Altimeter Group’s Charlene Li and Wetpaint ranked the top 100 brands based on social media engagement and has tried to establish co-relationship between the depth and extent of their social media engagement and ROI. The study has come as a fresh insight for all social media marketers and of course for investors and companies’ senior management.

Top 10 brands in terms of Social Media engagements

1.Starbucks, which scored 127 points  2. Dell (123 points)    3. eBay (115)  4. Google (105)   5. Microsoft (103) 6. Thomson Reuters (101)  7. Nike (100)  8. Amazon (88)  9. SAP (86)  10. Tie – Yahoo!/Intel (85)

As per the Report here are top 10 brands that are most engaged in social media. These brands take social media as the extension of their corporate office and have clearly shown grown in terms of revenue.

Depending on the engagement levels the report categorized brands into 4 types, viz Mavens, Butterflies, Selectives & Wallflowers. The most engaged brands are Mavens. Mavens not only have a robust strategy and dedicated teams focused on social media, but also make it a core part of their go-to-market strategy. Brands like Starbucks and Dell fall into this category. While brands like Duracell, Mercedes-Benz, McDonalds, and BP were among the wallflowers toward the bottom of the list showing average revenue drop of 6%.

Let’s see some of the key takeaways of the report

Social Media is Scalable: The report confirms “Engagement via social media is important — and we CAN quantify it”. Many different social media channels exist, each with a slightly different value proposition. Rather than try to understand just the individual value of each channel, the ENGAGEMENTdb looks across main channels and categorizes not only breadth but also depth of brand engagement in social media”.

What’s in it for me?: The ENGAGEMENTdb quantitatively demonstrates a statistically significant correlation between social media engagement and the two most meaningful financial performance metrics – revenue and profit. Money talks, and it’s declaring that it pays to engage meaningfully in social media.

Emphasize quality, not just quantity:The ENGAGEMENTdb Report shows that engagement is more than just setting up a blog and letting viewers post comments; it’s more than just having a Facebook profile and having others write on your wall. Rather, it’s keeping your blog content fresh and replying to comments; it’s building your friends network and updating your profile status. Don’t just check the box; engage with your customer audience.

To scale engagement, make social media part of everyone’s job:The best practice interviews have a common theme — social media is no longer the responsibility of a few people in the organization. Instead, it’s important for everyone across the organization to engage with customers in the channels that make sense — a few minutes each day spent by every employee adds up to a wealth of customer touch points.

Doing it all may not be for you — but you must do something:The optimal social media marketing strategy will depend on a variety of factors, including your industry. If your most valuable customers do not depend on or trust social media as a communication medium, or if your organization is resistant to engagement in some channels, you will have to start smaller and slower. But start you must, or risk falling far behind other brands, not only in your industry, but across your customers’ general online experience.

Find your sweet spot: Engagement can’t be skin-deep, nor is it a campaign that can be turned on and off. True engagement means full engagement in the channels where you choose to invest. Thus, choose carefully and advocate strongly to acquire the resources and support you will need to succeed. If you are resource-constrained, it is better to be consistent and participate in fewer channels than to spread yourself too thin.