Allocating a big budget for social media marketing is justified by measuring the return on investment for your marketing efforts. Measuring the ROI of your social media marketing is not child’s play. Rather it is a tough job for social media managers to estimate the success of what they have been doing on social media.
Customers are keen to quantify the return that is generated by investing in social media marketing and to know if it is working effectively. For this, the pre-requisite is to follow the steps that start with tracking the business’s investment and then by setting goals for ROI on social media efforts.
How can you measure the return on investment or ROI of your social media marketing endeavors? There are a number of ways to calculate it.
1. Measuring Social Audience Reach
You may have a growing number of audience members on your social media accounts and need to know the growth rate. It will help to measure your social media marketing and that can be discovered by measuring your social media audience on the basis of Facebook Likes, Twitter users or followers, LinkedIn Group members, YouTube subscribers, number of pins for Pinterest, etc.
Set a time period and determine if these audiences are growing.
2. Measuring Social Media Engagement
Another way to measure social media is to measure the engagement of users. Simply put, measure how many individuals are interacting or using your social media accounts by measuring the likes, comments and shares on Facebook, retweets for Twitter, comments for blog posts, video views on YouTube, +1s, shares and comments for Google Plus, etc.
Keeping a record of these items lets you know the investment generation rate.
3. Knowing About Brand Perception
It is advisable to always keep an eye on what people are saying about your brand. That’s not just on social media profiles or pages but everywhere on the Web. This measures increases in your online visibility by tracking your social mentions.
This can be done by using tools like Mention, Social Searcher or Google Alerts.
4. Conversion Rate From Social Media Visits
You should have some conversion goals for all of your social media efforts that will help you measure some actions that have monetary value. These conversion goals vary with social media platforms. Some of the built-in trackers are also available through Google analytics to measure things like reach, traffic, leads, and percentage of visitors of all social media platforms.
5. Knowledge of Click-through Rate and Impressions
Click-through Rate (CTR) helps to measure the success rate of advertising on social media and also to know the visibility of your brand. You can also keep an eye on profits by impression such as through PPC campaign.
CTR measures the number of people clicking on your ad whereas ROI is measured by percentage of profit compared to costs you spend for CPC (cost per click).
6. Tracking Social Media Traffic Influence
This is the simplest way to measure the traffic of your website coming from social media. But for this, you can also use Google Analytics. There are some other popular tools such as Klout, Social Authority and Brandwatch to measure the influence of a brand.
7. Watching Social Media Analytics
Social media analytics are a great way to measure social media marketing ROI, as it provides real-time feedback from all social media accounts. The analytics dashboard provides specific data required by the marketing department to help set social media strategy in the future.
Measuring the ROI of social media marketing is a great way to improve your social media efforts that may bring greater profits.
Social Media Photo via Shutterstock
[“source-smallbiztrends”]
