10 Ways To Measure Your Social Media ROI
Knowing how social media will affect your bottom line is essential for online marketing.
This is especially true in times of crisis (like marketing during the coronavirus outbreak), new product introductions, or executive shakeups, when your brand’s reputation is on the line. To capitalise on your moment and build momentum, you need a marketing strategy that includes social media and the means to track its success.
Social Media Today reports that 70% of online businesses that use social media for marketing purposes don’t bother to measure return on investment.
If you want to know how successful your social media campaign is, try one of these 10 methods for calculating return on investment.
Variation in Sales and/or Income
As far as our metrics go, this one is the simplest. Have your sales and revenue increased noticeably since you started using social media marketing? Examine your sales numbers and see if there is a correlation with your new or increased social media presence, controlling for other factors that could be affecting your business such as other marketing campaigns. Donations to charities can be tracked quantitatively.
Number of Supporters and Adherents
One could reasonably argue that this metric doesn’t reveal much. Just because you have a lot of fans and followers does not mean your social media campaign is successful. Once you have them, you need to put them to good use, whether that’s to increase sales, hire new staff, or decrease the number of support tickets you receive. However, a sizable fan base can be a decisive factor in gauging social media return on investment (ROI), as it allows for increased exposure and customer interaction.
The calibre of one’s supporters
It is generally true that the level of engagement from a social media audience is indicative of the quality of that audience. How engaged is your fan base? Does it consist of thousands of people who rarely comment or “like” your posts, or is it more like a few hundred who do so frequently? Although having a large fan base is beneficial, some may argue that having a smaller but more engaged fan base is preferable. So, what do you all think? It’s important to prioritise both quantity and quality.
How Many Comments/Replies Are Average For Each Post
The amount of interaction and attention your social media posts receive from your audience is directly proportional to the number of people who follow you. The number of comments and replies to a post is a measurable indication of how interested and engaged a fanbase is in a brand’s message and content. The greater the number of replies, the more likely it is that your message has been heard and understood.
Gain Amplifier (Shares and Retweets)
Although having a large number of fans and followers is beneficial, having fans who also have a large number of followers is of much greater value. Your social media content needs to be valuable and interesting enough for your primary network to share it with their followers, and those followers’ followers make up your second level network. Your audience size instantly increases.
Number of Likes, Favorites, and Shares
Considering these metrics can help you determine if you are providing your audience with the information they are seeking. When content you share on social media doesn’t get much attention from your followers, it’s probably not very interesting. But if a tweet or Facebook post goes viral, you should investigate what made it so popular. When a Facebook user “likes” one of your posts, it may appear in the activity feed of one of their friends, thereby expanding your audience.
The Increasing Number of Fans and Followers
The consistency of your fan and follower growth rate is more crucial than the absolute number of your fans and followers. Your target market should expand in tandem with your company. You should reevaluate your audience-building strategies if you see rapid initial growth in the number of fans and followers, followed by a plateau, stagnation, or a decline in that number.
Goodness of Potential Customers’ Inquiries
What constitutes a high-quality lead changes depending on the specifics of your business. At the outset of a social media campaign, however, your company should settle on a single definition of a high-quality lead. Determine if you’re reaching the wrong people on social media if your lead generation efforts there have been less than successful. Is it possible that your ideal customer uses a different network than the one you’ve chosen to cater to?
Quantity of Blog Reads
Even though the number of comments made on a blog post can be a good indicator of the value of social media, there are some people online who don’t bother to comment at all, no matter how interesting the post might be. They may not be engaging with you directly, but that doesn’t mean your message isn’t getting through. The success or failure of your current content strategy can be gauged by tracking how often readers visit your blog and how many pages they view during their stay.
Web traffic to landing pages promoting social media networks
Many businesses now use a dedicated landing page for each of their social media profiles to attract customers who have found them through a referral. As an example, you can tailor the information you show a LinkedIn referral differently from what you show a Facebook referral. These landing pages can be monitored for their click-through rates as well as other post-click metrics like average time on site and pageviews.
