Social Media ROI
Metrics are important. Return-On-Investment (ROI) measures the amount of return on an investment relative to the investment’s cost. Cost refers to a unit of money, time, resource or a combination of the above. However, social media measurement can be a bit of a puzzle. How does one go about measuring the ROI on social media marketing activities?
Imagine this common scenario:
Your B2B company has a social media team. You have invested in cool & useful tools for social media management. The team has planned the social media strategy based on research into the target audience(s) for the product. Twitter and LinkedIn are selected as the primary networks for promoting social media posts. Content is created or sourced, campaigns are set-up, a cadence of posting established. Everything seems to be going well. The posts are getting engagement- clicks, shares, retweets, comments. Then, the executive team asks ” What is the ROI of your social media marketing activities?”. Quiet. Then, a murmur about audience engagement- the clicks, shares, retweets. Management is not satisfied. They demand more proof. Now what?
Assessing ROI of a company’s social media marketing campaign can be broken down into the following:
- First, figure out your goal for social media activities. Is it for creating brand awareness? Customer service? How about the tough one- increasing revenues?
- Identify the costs of social media. Nail down the cost of the resources invested in social media activities at your company- both human and technology. If you don’t know your costs, how can you measure returns?
- Link social media to some core measure of business result. Examples: revenue, new customers, customer satisfaction etc. It may not be easy, but such measurement is critical to prove value.
- Use audience comments and engagement as feedback to improve your product or service. For example, social conversations could result in eliminating or adding a new feature to your product that increases it’s value. This could lead to increased sales of the modified product.
- Use measurement tools. To get integrated, near/real-time results across your social media, you can use one of several tools that measure and track audience engagement and conversion.
- Utilize the power of social media advocacy to scale your social media campaigns. There are advocacy tools such as NewzSocial that enable you to do this very easily. Imagine the amplification of a Facebook or LinkedIn post or a Tweet flowing to 100’s of advocate timelines or walls. The resulting analytics will display the results. Your digital marketing admin may already have some ballpark estimate of average cost /engagement or cost/ acquiring new follower for the corporate page that can be used to calculate the ROI of advocacy.
Do plan, execute, track, and document the results of your social media activities to solidify your ROI metrics.
