5 Tips on Measuring the Return on Investment of Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

Social Media Marketing Success Metrics

Some still believe that it is difficult to measure the value of social media when it comes to utilizing it to market goods and services. Some feel that measuring its value is difficult, or even impossible. Well, I am here to lay this misnomer to rest and at the same time, give you the assurance that the benefits of social media marketing can be measured. In fact, there is so much information and data associated with a basic social media marketing campaign, that the real challenge for many organizations is finding a way to organize and interpret success metrics in an effective and useful way.

Savvy organizations are not only measuring their social media ROI, but are taking their measurements a step forward and using social data to grow revenue, reach, leads and build stronger relationships with current clients. There are many tools that can be used to do this. Measuring your return on investment is the first step that should be taken before you implement a social media marketing strategy. The reason being is that it is difficult to know where you are headed if you don’t know where your social media marketing efforts are. It is best to measure the analytics of your current on-line presence before you can launch a new strategy or improve upon the old one.

The following are 5 tips and tools that can help you measure your social media’s return on investment:

1. Google Analytics – Any good and comprehensive ROI measurement strategy begins with Google Analytics. This powerful tool allows you to check the quality, quantity and relevance of the content that you are posting. Google Analytics also helps you monitor unique page views, the time your audience spends on certain pages and total pages viewed. If unique page views go up, that’s an indication that your reach is growing, increased time on page shows that your content is interesting to the visitor and increased total page views means your visitor wants to learn more by clicking on other pages around your site. You can also track the total size of community and engagement – growth and engagement levels utilizing Google Analytics.

2. Set Goals – Before you are able to put to use your findings from Google Analytics, you will first have to setup some measurement goals. These goals should be associated with some type of conversion that you would like to see from your social media. A conversion can be a sale, lead, subscription to your blog or newsletter. A conversion is an attainable goal that you have established before any measuring takes place.

3. Set measurable and attainable goals – Aligning your goals with your metrics allows measurement to be effective. These measurements must align directly with the measurable goals you’ve set. Those objectives should follow the SMART method, first introduced by Peter Drucker in his 1954 book, The Practice of Management. The acronym stands for your goals being Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Timed.

4. Use a Social Media Dashboard – One of the main reasons that measuring social media campaigns is so challenging, is because the data can be all over the place. You may have some data directly from social networks, some from third-party tools and other data from internal analytics teams. This can make assessing a campaign incredibly overwhelming. A social media dashboard like HootSuite or Sprout Social will bring all of this data together under one platform.

5. Hire an Expert – If you have the budget for it, hiring a social-media marketing firm or independent consultant can help you measure — and increase — the overall impact your social campaigns have on your revenue. Your valuable time equates to money and an experienced professional can help save you valuable time while adding value to your social media strategy.