Measuring Your Social Media ROI – Seven Questions to ask yourself

 

Social Media is becoming the number one tool organizations are using to promote their products and services to the world. Over 75 percent of businesses around the world have social media accounts where they connect their brands with actual and potential customers.

To get the best results and ROI from your social media marketing efforts, it’s highly recommended to make decisions based on data and performance. In measuring the ROI on your social media effort, you must ask yourself the following questions;

 

1. What is my goal?

You need to define one or two measurable or SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely) goals or objectives. Defining your goals will in turn help you to determine what metrics you need to measure and analyze. Some goals may include, but not limited to measuring engagement, mentions, clicks to your website, likes.

 

2 What’s the best way to measure my social media efforts?

Post meaningful, authentic content that provides value to your audience. This content will aide in getting you noticed, more people will start following and sharing your brand. To measure your social media efforts may want to analyze :

• Optimal times for engagement
• Follower of fan growth
• Clicks to your website from social media
• Audience demographics
• “Likes” and reactions to your posts and content
• Measuring engagement
• Impressions
• Tracking influence
• Measuring sentiment

Test, analyze, revise, repeat.

 

3. Is there a way I can track conversion?

Google analytics is a great tool for getting detailed analytics .  Using Google Analytics you can track leads, sales, conversions and other relevant actions . You are even able to measure which social media networks your traffic originated from. Tracking conversions using Google Analytics is a great way to analyze the efficacy of your social media efforts and determine ROI.

 

 

4. How to leverage the social media data gathered to grow my business?

The data that you gather from your social media efforts using Google Analytics will help you discover each of your social media channnel’s strenghts and give you the an opportunity to improve and build on what works for your business, when it works and who it’s working with. Without this information, you may be wasting valuable time producing content for an audience who is disinterested .

 

5. Which metrics should I monitor ?

At first glance it may seem like the most important metric to monitor is  how many followers you may have- vanity metrics. But, I’m here to tell you it’s not the only important metric to pay attention to. Your audience is very important. Who your audience is (demographics), the time of day that you get likes and reactions, the type of content that you get likes and reactions from (engagement) and how your audience reacts to the content (sentiment) is important information to monitor so that you can provide value to your audience.

 

6. My schedule is very tight, should I outsource my social media?

Social media management requires time and 1000% dedication. 89% of social media requests go unanswered by brands  — which often leads to those consumers heading straight into your competitor’s arms. Social media is more than just branding, it’s relationship building so don’t think of your outsourced social media marketing as the guy who tweets for you but think of them as part of your marketing team.

 

7. What should I avoid?

Too many businesses focus on building their following soley on social media. Focus on using social media to build something that you own and control like your blog and email list. Don’t forget to listen and don’t ignorethe data.