Being active on social media is no doubt effective and important for your business, but what concerns businesses is the complex task of measuring the return on investment from social media campaigns. It can be a daunting task but it is not impossible.
While it’s important to know exactly how much worth social media marketing is bringing to your business, it can be difficult to know the exact numbers. Nevertheless, having a fair and rational picture helps. Here are some ways to measure social media ROI:
Determine Measurable Goals
The first important thing is to define your objective, attach a measurable outcome with a time limit and try to quantify your efforts in some way. For instance, you post pictures or a status relevant to your business and start building value, next you give out vouchers to encourage those people to buy your product. The number of vouchers you give out can give you a measure of the worth your activity created for your business.
Use Standard Analytical Tools
There are a number of tools available which give different kinds of statistics showing your effectiveness through the different social platforms. Facebook for example gives an insight dashboard for your page which helps you understand your audience better and improve your content according to the needs. Likewise, Twitter and Google+ also have these analytics tools incorporated helping you gauge online performance of your content.
Use Specialized Tools
From the standard tools that are available to gauge the outreach of your tweets and posts, other metrics give you an opportunity to gauge performance across all platforms together. For example, a free tool named Klout lets you measure influence across several platforms like Google+, Facebook and Twitter. BrandMentions is another tool that will inform you about the general sentiment and also who is saying what. Oktopost is another such tool with special focus on LinkedIn, it tells you among other things which posts created a conversation and so on.
Turn Data into Information
Start creating links between data and try to translate raw data into a measurable outcome for your activity. For example, the relationship between the number of likes and increased traffic to your site can be measured. Similarly, the increase in traffic to your site related to the additional revenue can easily be measured. Keep an eye out for trends, and see if the traffic to your site increases after you made a post. Always remember that a share of your post or tweet is more valuable than a like or comment because that is making you reach beyond your page, flooding others newsfeed and generating possible traffic back to you.
Having quantitative results related to your social media marketing campaigns will help you refine your strategies and will allow you to gain the most out of your campaigns. Use the methods discussed in this blog post and send us feedback regarding your experiences. We look forward to hearing from you.
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Great post. I’m definitely going to try Oktopost. Thanks!