If you answered yes, it is likely that you aren't utilizing your social media correctly. Not only does social media provide a return on investment, but it can absolutely be tracked, measured, and reported.

In order to see a yield from your investment, you must have a highly engaging, goal-driven social media campaign that will not only help to generate brand awareness but also serve to increase leads, revenue, sales, and customer satisfaction. Easier said than done, right?

You could always get a young intern who spends their day on social media to post for you. That should work, right?  If you are going to hire someone to post for you sans a social media strategy or any level of expertise, then you can kiss your social media return goodbye, as there can't be profit with little to no investment.  

If you want for this kind of publicity to work, you'll have to invest both time and money. However, before you even get started, you'll need to figure out what you are looking to accomplish via your social media.

DEFINING OBJECTIVES

Before you can track social media ROI, you have to understand your goals and establish fundamental metrics. You can't gauge the efficacy of your social media if you don't know what you are looking for.

Be as specific as possible: brand awareness, increased conversions, etc.

- Conversions - Increase sales and/or sign-ups by 10%

- Brand Awareness/Perception- Increase social share by 4%

- Customer Experience- A decrease in the time to address concerns by 35%

-  Reputation Manager- Increase preventative crises management measures by 20%

Don't limit your objectives to just one thing; it should be a mixture of things that make sense for your company. Remember, the secret to understanding social media ROI is defining what exactly you hope to gain as a return on your investment of time and money.  

TRACKING SOCIAL MEDIA ROI

Your objectives will determine what you need to track in terms of social media ROI. All this can be accomplished by using a combination of available tools.

By using a combination of tools such as Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Third-Party Social tools and the built-in analytics provided by some of the social platforms, you can extract the necessary information on which objectives you are meeting and which still need some work.

If you are interested in measuring your brand awareness, monitoring certain brand mentions and comparing them to your competitors will shed light on your market share versus that of your competitor. If you add the total mentions, and then divide it by your social shares—you’ll have the percent of your market share. You should  compare this number before the onset of the campaign and then again as the campaign progresses. This way, you will clearly  see how effective your campaign has been, and if it needs to be changed to address unmet objectives.  

Rest assured that each of the targets you wish to achieve has metrics that can be tracked to find out the effectiveness of your strategy/campaign.

If you can't prove your social media ROI, it's time to hire help in managing your social media presence to ensure that it is helping and not hurting your brand, business, and objectives.

Looking for a second opinion? We offer a free social media audit. We can help you identify critical areas that are not currently optimized and to best leverage your social media.

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