Measuring ROI in social media is similar to calculating ROI in traditional marketing efforts. Everybody knows that you need to stand out from your competition in order to impact your audience, but how do you measure the exposure, influence and engagement of your marketing efforts?
For example: if you have an A4 advertisement printed in a magazine, how do you know how many people that advertisement reached? How do you know how many of those reached the advertisement influenced? More importantly, how do you know the many of those reached were engaged enough to do something about it? Perhaps not immediately, but in the future?
Here is the ultimate guide to measuring ROI in social media:
Measure Exposure
Exposure allows you to know how many people your posts could potentially reach:
Twitter: How many new followers have you encountered? How many followers retweeted your posts? How many followers do these Twitter accounts have? A free tool you can utilise for Twitter measurement is TweetReach which allows you to compare month-to-month growth rate.
Facebook: How many new fans have liked your brands page? How many fans commented and liked your posts? Facebook insights provide excellent insight to identifying the potential of your Facebook reach.
YouTube: How many new views have your videos received? How many new subscribers has your channel acquired? Are these new views and subscribers tied to any promotion? Measure growth over a specific time period.
Blog: How many visitors view your new content over a period of time? Is the visitors to your old and new posts steadily increasing?
Email: How many emails are signed up to your distribution list? How many received the emails that you have been distributing?
Calculate Engagement
How many people did something with your post? How many people cared enough to do something about it?
Twitter: How many followers clicked-through to the content you have been sharing? How many people retweeted your content? How many people used the hashtag to your social media campaign? How many people directly engaged with your brand?
Facebook: How many followers clicked-through to the content you have been distributing? How many times were your posts liked and commented on? How many direct messages and wall posts, directly in respondent to your campaign, did you receive?
YouTube: How many new comments on your videos have you obtained? How many new rates on your videos have you gotten? How many times were your videos shared recently?
Blog: How many new comments are on your blog posts? How many new subscribers have you generated? How many times was your content shared on social media and where was this content shared? How many third-party blogs commented on your blog and resulting in referral traffic?
Email: How many people opened your email? How many people clicked onto the content distributed on the email? How many people shared this email and where was the content shared? How many new subscriptions did this generate?
Determine Influence
There is a big debate on social media marketing to whether it can or cannot be measured. Measuring the influence your social media marketing efforts has is a subjective metric and relies on your company's own perspective. There are tools to track the influence your social media has but they can be costly.
Instead you should look at the exposure and engagement metrics listed above. Was the responses positive, neutral or negative? Did your company influence the vibe they initially intended? Who engaged with your posts? Were there any big players who have a large amount of followers?
You should be spending your time engaging with influential users as well as your average social media user. They can have a huge amount of influence over your industry. One share of your post could ultimately result in lots of business leads.
Track Your Social Measurements
It goes without saying that should be tracking these measurements. Depending on what your company's goals are, depends on how often you should measure your successes. A smaller company may want to track their measurements monthly, whereas a larger organisation will want to track specific measurements on a daily basis.
You should track your social measurements on a dashboard in Excel or Google docs. This dashboard should highlight the key metrics which matter to your business. By tracking this data, you will be able to track progress in your efforts and find room for development.