Posting on your social media profiles three to five times a day is nice.
Responding to engagement once an hour is nice, too.
What’s really nice though is when you see a conversion happen because of your social media efforts, whether that’s the consistent posting you’re doing or the speedy response time with your engagement.
Money is to be made with social media, it just takes a lot of measurement, strategy reconstruction, some more measuring, a bit more reconstructing, and a big sprinkle of engagement.
It certainly isn’t as easy to see ROI from social media efforts like it is from say a pay-per-click or local search campaign. That’s thanks to the many “vanity” metrics that come with social media.
Likes on a post are great, but not so great if your primary goal on social media is to drive traffic to the blog or increase shoe sales.
Vanity metrics (e.g., likes, shares, comments) can muddle up the metric measurements making it extra difficult to uncover any real ROI on social.
So, how can you measure if your social media is producing ROI?
Let’s break this apart.
Measuring your social media isn’t impossible, it may be muddled with vanity metrics mentioned above, but it is possible to uncover real conversions and quantify efforts.
The key to gaining real ROI from social media can be produced with these simple steps.
Businesses can accomplish dozens of goals by using social media.
Here are a few of the most common and measurable goals.
This is going to track your business profile’s fan/following growth, engagement growth, and mentions over time. If everything has increased over a designated time period then you are on track to hitting your goal. Whereas if growth remains the same your brand awareness is not reaching a larger audience and therefore not indicating any gained ROI.
For this one, pick a specific page or section that you want to increase traffic to (e.g., the homepage, a specific product category page, the entire blog, or the contact page) and then measure.
Overall website traffic is great to track, but you really want to narrow in and define exactly where to push your social media followers so you can easily measure the traffic increase and referral source.
The goal here is to turn your social media efforts into leads, whether it’s getting people to:
These social media posts can include a link to a landing page that has a form and track how many form fill outs are coming from a social media referral source.
You’ll also be able to track post clicks and do a bit of math to determine conversions and acquisition rate per lead.
Every business (big and small) should focus on obtaining influencers on social media right now.
Influencers can be so valuable to your arsenal.
Make it a goal on social media to scout and create relationships with new influencers.
Just to designate that you want to generate “sales” thanks to social posting isn’t specific enough.
Chose exactly how many sales you want to happen and what kind of sales.
For example, a realistic goal here could be that you want to generate 25 new skateboard shoe sales coming from Instagram.
Pick the product/service and how many sales you want to achieve.
Please don’t make your timeline to accomplish a social media goal only one week.
Be realistic here. Try a 30-day social media campaign, or even stretch it out through a quarter.
Certain goals like direct product sales may take a bit longer than one week to produce, especially if you aren’t putting any money towards social ads to help.
Plus, you need to gain metrics over time to learn how to better strategize the campaign if you aren’t consistently hitting your goal week-to-week.
If the first run through doesn’t produce the ROI you want, then analyze the metrics you received from that first run through and notate what worked and fix what didn’t. Your timeline may have been the cause.
Let’s look at the goals above and put a few realistic timelines on them.
Certain social media goals will come with certain strategies.
In order to achieve a 12 percent increase in sales from social media, you’ll need to put in a completely different effort than you would for trying to accomplish the new influencer goal.
Just as with any digital marketing strategy, the efforts must match the goal.
Here are a few realistic strategy steps to make in order to accomplish our five original social media goals.
While some goals are easy to measure such as whether you gained five new influencers, other goals are a bit more difficult to track down where the success or failures came from.
Luckily, there are certain tools and metrics that will help determine if you’ve accomplished your goal thanks to your social media efforts.
Let’s look at our original five goals and which metrics/tools we should be using to measure ROI.
Whether or not your goals were met within the desired timeline, it’s important to keep tracking social media metrics.
A lot can change on social media so have a clear vision of what is going on, all of the time, and when ROI opportunities arise.
When I say a lot can change, I mean groundbreaking things like:
More Social Media Marketing Resources:
Image Credits
Screenshot taken by author, July 2018