Even though social media is not a new trend anymore, it’s still a big buzz word online. Many businesses are jumping on the social media bandwagon full of hopes to reach new customers, build brand awareness, and increase sales, but how are they measuring their return? How can you determine if your social media marketing strategy is yielding a positive ROI?
Measuring the financial outcome of your social media marketing campaigns is not an easy task, but it can be done. Many businesses that are measuring the ROI of their social media campaigns are watching for direct metrics that can be measured. These metrics can show you very good results, but they will not show a direct financial outcome. You will have to tie these into your business goals if you want to see the financial value of these metrics.
Here’s a couple of metrics you can monitor:
Social media metrics
- Twitter followers
- Facebook likes
- Number of retweets
- Number of positive mentions
- Number of brand searches
- Website visitor traffic from social media
- Organic SEO improvements
- Number of comments
These are really great indicators that can show you if your initiative is successful, but they do fail in showing any financial return. Working out the ROI for your campaign should be directly integrated into your business metrics such as an increase in sales, leads, decrease in marketing costs, and brand awareness.
The best way to measure this if you add all the social media indicators you are going to use in an excel file that shows results over a period of time, and then overlay these results with your business financial results. For an example, measure an increase in positive brand mentions over a period of time against sales of the same period. Do you see an increase or decrease in sales due to your campaign?