Now more than ever, brands want to be present in various social media platform. Your business must be on Facebook, Twitter and other popular social media sites. However, just having a social media presence is not enough. Like any other business it is essential to measure the effectiveness of the social profiles. What if you can know that for every $ invested in your social media campaign, the return you are pulling back? Any marketers will like to have a proof of their ROI, and examining the metrics may help.
Why you need to measure the ROI?
ROI is the evidence of whether your marketing efforts are working or not. Social media, however, is not a sales machine and so, the traditional way of measuring the ROI will not work. Major brands from Nissan to Coca-Cola have admitted that they are unaware of the impacts of their social media investments. Actually, tracking customer acquisition, clicks, lead generation, brand awareness, and audience building is much easier when you are trying to chalk out the social ROI. The challenge is to keep with the changes in algorithm and implement new tools to evaluate what you are getting from the social media investments.
Setting goals for your social media profiles
Perhaps, you want to keep track of your re-tweets, re-posts, shares, emails, or likes. The point is, you have to define the social media goals and determine the factors you need to measure. Social media is not an activity, it is a channel. You cannot measure a channel. What will you measure then? Measure the activities that you use to communicate the message through social media channels.
Beyond revenue, the value of social media initiatives lies in developing and strengthening the relationship between the consumers and the brands. The metrics that you can consider to determine the social media marketing success are:
- Reach
- Engagement
- Audience
- Leads
- Conversions
You can use these metrics to track the traffic to your profile, emotional effect that your brand is able to create, engagement, lead generation, and sales conversions.
Auditing the social media marketing ROI
Once you have established the social media goals, you have to identify and implement the tools to measure the ROI of your social media activities. There are a variety of free and paid analytics tools to determine the ROI. Facebook Insights, Hoot Suite, Social Mention, Google Analytics, Klout- there are numerous other free tools to monitor your social ROI.
If you know that your target audiences prefer a particular social media profile, look for an analytical tool that works best for that platform. As each website has its own ways to gather data, therefore you will require different tools for that. This site-specific tools can supplement the stats you are looking for.
Reporting what you have found
After you have selected the tools, it’s time to run the reports. How regular you have to be with the reports? It can be weekly, fortnightly, monthly or yearly as per your requirements. You must have thought of a reporting schedule. But, at minimum, checking stats on monthly basis will help to determine what is working and what is not. A flawless social media report includes:
- Total number of mentions
- Social platforms with maximum buzz
- Calculation of how many times people viewed your content or anything you shared through the social media profile
- Audience demographic
- Countries, regions and cities where most of the engagement happened
- Customers’ feelings and opinions about your brands
- Who are the top influencers and are they able to change people’s perception about your brand
After ensuring that all the mandatory metrics are there in your report, you should take time to filter the results. Remember, a good report will offer comprehensive insights, and you do not have to swim through the oceans of data.
If possible, export your data to another tool that may help to create a better and complete visual representation of the stats. Tools like Cyfe will enable you to export your data into a single dashboard. It will help you to publish and share your results easily.
Reviewing the results and resetting the goals
Once you have started with the process of analysis, there is no need to stop. With the ROI reports in your hand you can clearly see the marketing efforts which clicked and which did not. Quicksprout teaches you to assign value to your customers and use that figure to derive the social media ROI. The stats in your reports enable you to readjust the social media strategies and improve the approaches to achieve a better ROI.