How Can My Business Measure Its Social Media Marketing ROI?

Many companies often find it frustrating to measure their social media marketing ROI because of the ambiguity it brings, changes in algorithms, and the implementation of new tools. However, there are many ways to measure social media marketing ROI that are simple. I’ll break these ways down simply into three main categories that are easy to understand: reach, engagement, and conversion.

1.) Reach

One of the most important aspects of measuring social marketing ROI is to look at the social reach. Examples of measuring the reach is keeping track of the number of followers, connections, likes, etc. Reach gives your team a good understanding of how attractive your social media content is to your target audience and provides hints on what’s working and what’s not.

You can keep track of the reach manually on all social platforms (think spreadsheets), but you also can use the analytic reports on certain social platforms provide (and most for free!). Likewise, if you want to go one step further, check out third-party services like Klout or Radian6 to measure analytics.

However, companies shouldn’t just look at esoteric measurements like ‘likes’ and ‘followers’ and call it good. There’s SO much more than like engagement.

2.) Engagement 

Measuring your social media marketing ROI by its engagement is important because it lets you understand and measure if your target audience is being interactive or not with your content. If your engagement level is low, you need to take a critical and strategic look at how to improve your content. You already know you should be engaging with your target audience on social media, but you need to always be creating valuable content that’s worth consuming. Don’t just ‘produce content to produce content.’ If you do, your business will not only lose engagement but also brand loyalty and conversion opportunities.

Just like the reach, you can also keep track of engagement manually, use the analytic reports social platforms provide, or the third-party services linked above in the “Reach” section.

3.) Conversion

Besides reach and engagement, to measure your social media ROI you also should measure conversions. Conversions showcase how many people took ‘the next step’ after viewing your social media marketing. I recommend strategically linking many of your social posts back to your website–using it has a central ‘hub’ in order to track this data. Implementing this strategy will show how many people actually took action after viewing your content.

Conversion Tip:

Track your social media marketing ROI through Google Analytics and figure out how many people are converting from your content.

If you haven’t already, integrate Google Analytics into your website to track its site activity. Once it’s implemented, leverage ‘campaign tracking’ and build trackable links for each of your social media posts. (Use the free link shortening site, Bitly, to shorten these links if they ask for shorter links) Then set up ‘goal tracking’ to track all your online conversion activities. Ultimately, this then closes the loop, allowing you to track ROI from your social media marketing campaigns. This is the easiest way to track the ROI on conversions, so if you try it out, let me know how you like it in the comments section!

 

Additional questions

Do you have any more questions about measuring social media marketing ROI? Leave them in the comments section below and we’ll answer them!