With social media edging it’s way into the big leagues of major marketing tools, businesses are putting in more effort and money to effectively utilizing the power of social. Just like print or electronic media, it is important that your social media investment positively contributes to your bottom line. These four easy steps will help you measure your social media’s ROI.
Connect Back to Business Goals
Your social media goals should compliment your pre-existing business goals. Audit your social media performance and set goals for performance improvement. You should also set goals for page visit conversion through social media along with leads driven by social media. Vanity metrics such as “likes” or “retweets” may seem important because they make you feel good, but they don’t hold much value as far as ROI is concerned. Valuable Metrics include: reach, site traffic, lead generation, conversions, and revenue generation.
Use a Social Media Analytics Tool
Once you’ve set your goals, you’ll need to use tools to measure your ROI. In addition to implementing analytics tools, you may have to add tracking codes to URLs, or build custom landing pages. Several analytics tools to consider are; Google Analytics, Salesforce, or Hootsuite Analytics, just to name a few.
Calculate Your ROI
Frequently check your social media ROI to adjust your campaign as needed. You should anticipated having to make occasional changes to adjust to the ever evolving mobile and web world.
Improve. Once you learn what works – do more of that. However, understanding (and admitting) what doesn’t work and why could be the most important part of maximizing ROI. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes – those only cost you money if you don’t react to them and tweak your approach. Making changes for the better and tracking your social media ROI will hopefully help you increase its value over time.
