How to Measure ROI in Social Media Marketing

Quantifying social media ROI is essential in securing buy-in as well as budget for your social media marketing strategy. Being able to measure the ROI of your social media efforts also shows you what’s working and what’s not. This allows you to shift resources as well as tactics to be more effective.

The job of a digital marketer

Evaluating the success of various social media marketing campaigns is an aspect of a digital marketer’s job. This is because it’s critical to ascertain how your digital marketing efforts are contributing to the business’ bottom line. However, according to statistics 70% of online businesses – which use social media – don’t worry out measuring ROI.

It’s incredibly surprising to find out that the bulk of online businesses are conducting their social media marketing completely in a vacuum and don’t have any clue as to how social media contributes to the accomplishments of their business. It is recommended you complete a social media marketing course to truly understand how social media works.

Social media ROI is a difficult to measure

Although the ROI of social media is indeed tricky to measure, the effort needs to be made in order to quantify this as there is money to be made with social media. All it takes for social media to become a profitable marketing channels is:

• A lot of measurement,
• Strategy reconstruction, as well as

It undoubtedly isn’t as simple to see an ROI from social media efforts as it is from a pay-per-click (PPC) or local search campaign. This is because there is a very direct correlation between the success or failure of a PPC campaign: it either refers traffic to your website or it doesn’t. With social media, there are many “vanity” metrics that come into play.

What are vanity metrics in social media?

The term ‘vanity metrics’ includes data such as the following, for example:

• Social media followers,
• Pageviews, and

These analytics are satisfying on paper however but these don’t do anything positive for your business goals. These offer positive reporting however do not provide any context for future marketing decisions — something actionable metrics can do.

1. Facebook Fans

Engagement rates for branded Facebook Pages have dropped by more than 20%? The more that businesses post content on Facebook, the more that other companies need to share newsfeed space. This translates into the less that users see as well as consume from any one company. This means that – irrespective of the number of people who have clicked “Like” once they’re on a brand’s Page – the vast majority of them never return to the Page itself. In addition, they never see the content in their newsfeeds.

2. Twitter Followers

On Twitter, it certainly shouldn’t be about the number of followers which you have. Individuals usually follow random accounts for reasons that are unrelated to their actual interest in these accounts. Many Twitter users, for example, will follow you as they want you to follow them in return. If you don’t, you’ll often find that you lose that follower a couple of days later.

3. Blog Post Page Views

This number indicates that you’ve succeeded in establishing yourself as a thought leader. In addition to this, you’ve created great content. These are both good initial steps in an inbound marketing plan. However, page views don’t show:

• Where these views are coming from,
• If they answer a reader’s questions, or – alternatively
• Even how long they spent on that page.

4. Email Open Rate

The term ‘open rate’ refers to a metric that is reasonable to track in order to ascertain the effectiveness of the subject line of your email as well as timing. However, there are technical limitations to email open rates as many email clients have to load images in order to count as an open and many users turn images off by default. Track this metric but don’t obsess about it.

5. Number of Subscribers or Product Users

It’s simple to track the number of people who have converted into a trial user or agreed to receive your newsletter. However, are people actually consuming your product and digital content? Often a product demo or email goes unused or unseen.

Don’t worry if your brand’s results differ significantly different from your competition. The essential  thing is to consistently work towards improving your social media ROI.