Measuring Social Media ROI: Do My Followers Mean Anything?
In this time of digitization, marketers all around the world are veering towards social media marketing as the next big thing in the industry. You oftentimes hear these corporate giants having a large social media presence and you would want to also be as effective as these big companies when it comes to your social media marketing strategy. Despite its effectiveness, social media marketing is still a topic of debate in the marketing world since there is no concrete and clear way on how to measure its effectiveness and efficiency—in other words it would be impossible to tell how much one Facebook post or one Instagram post has actually reeled in terms of sales. However easy it may sound or look like, it actually requires so huge of an investment to successfully launch a social media campaign. This is why the marketers of the present came up with the concept of social media ROI.
To start with, ROI is a common term in the business world and is a measure of an organization’s effectiveness and efficiency which stands for “return on investment” or the return of an investment relative to the investment’s cost. Using this concept in social media marketing, we will have the social media ROI. Social media ROI is the measurement of the effectiveness of an organization’s social media marketing strategy. According to Pixlee, Social Media ROI is the measurement or proof that your social media marketing efforts are working. With this said, Social Media ROI then is the return on the time, money, and other resources that your company has spent on social media platforms.
Like any investment, you would want to track how it is working for you. Your investors, stockholders and other stakeholders will ask you for results. More than how attributes to sales and revenues, there are a lot more reasons why there is a need to measure social media ROI and they are listed as follows.
- Like any investment, you would want an immediate action in case it was a bad call.
- You would know where to improve and apply more efforts unto making this improvement.
- You will be able to choose and decide the best social media channel or platform that can give you the maximum return possible.
- You will have a concrete tracking of how these improvements change your organization.
How do you measure then your company’s social media ROI?
First, begin with identifying and defining a clear set of goals and objectives for your social media campaign. What does your company aim after launching this social media campaign? It could be any of the given below.
- Business Conversions
o An example would be looking at how many of your target market actually responded to a blast email that you sent.
o Or how many of your Instagram followers joined the promo that you just posted and how many new followers did you get from this social media effort?
- Brand Awareness
o What words do your customers and non-customers associate with your product or service?
o Upon mentioning your brand, is there a recognition or retention or none at all?
- WordCloud
o How many times and how frequent is your product or service talked about or mentioned by the people on social media?
Now that your objectives are already set, it is time to identify the goals that your company must achieve in order to achieve the given objectives. Make sure that the goals are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-based. You should not just have a goal of improving customer perception. Instead, you can have it as gain 90,000 new twitter followers by the end of the first quarter or lessen the follower fall out by 10% in June 2019.
With the previous paragraph, it is clear to see that measurement would need metrics to know if it is successful or not. With a lot of metrics available, how do choose then the best metrics that your company should use? According to Hootsuite, Metrics represent the standard or baseline of how you’re going to measure whether you’re achieving your goals and objectives or not. Social metrics are sometimes called as “vanity metrics” such as followers, likes, comments, and shares but it’s important not to dismiss them entirely. Instead, use metrics that directly demonstrate how social media is helping achieve your objectives. These could include:
Reach
Audience engagement
Site traffic
Leads generated
Sign-ups and conversions
Revenue generated
There are a lot of available tools online that actually help you track customer traffic, conversion funnels, as well as tools that help you in reporting the gathered data such as google analytics and Facebook pixels.
Then follows the implementation. There is then a need to launch the campaign in the shortest time possible since times and trends are ever changing.
Next, is the evaluation of the social media strategy. There is a need to evaluate whether the strategy has satisfied the goals and objectives.
Lastly, Adjustments. This is where necessary improvements will be further made.
Measuring social media ROI will help in adding value to your organization. Click here to schedule a complimentary Brand Consultation.