How do you Measure Social Media ROI for Your Business?

I am taking my own advice, and am away on vacation! I am therefore so thrilled to introduce my guest blogger – Ingrid Riley!

Ingrid is an award-wining tech blogger at SiliconCaribe.com and speaks on Social Media, Digital Culture and Digital Business. She has addressed audiences in North America, Europe, Africa and of course the Caribbean. The founder and Chief Digital Strategist at getConnectid.com, she is the only Digital Strategist in Jamaica and in the top 5 in the Caribbean who has developed and executed on Digital Strategies for an entire country. I met Ingrid about 10 years ago at a Social Media workshop. I was blown away then by the depth and breadth of her knowledge and expertise in this area, and still am! She’s my “go to” person whenever I need digital strategy advice!

Here is Ingrid’s advice on how to measure Social Media ROI for your business:

The most common mistake most companies make is to rush headfirst into digital marketing, with zero strategy and a “let’s see what happens” approach.

Now, while a culture of experimentation and being nimble is necessary, because of how fast things change in our Digital World, we believe knowledge is power and having a Digital Strategy Blueprint that is based on trend data, actionable insights and global best practices, is better for your business – that’s if you plan on winning with customers and outrunning your competition.

So if you’re one of many businesses that rushed ahead without a digital strategy and are now asking “where is my return on investment, ROI?” – well, there’s your reason right there. You jumped in before setting goals and developing a strategy. This probably means you’re not measuring the right things and now 3, 6 or more months later into it, you’re questioning your digital marketing spend and you want to know – what have you really achieved….where is your Social Proof?

No need to be upset with yourself or your team, because for many businesses going Digital and being Digital, is still new a world to learn and conquer. Therefore let’s pause and let me walk you through a process on “How to Measure Social Media ROI for Your Business.”

But first … why Measure Your ROI?

ROI is proof that your social media marketing efforts are working to achieve the results you intended and therefore it’s important for you to know. The thing is that in measuring ROI, the biggest challenge is keeping up with the many changes in algorithms, new platforms, tools coming to the marketplace and determining the proof that you are getting the most out of your investment. That said let’s get to it.

Here are the 5 steps to your ROI.

#1 Set Social Media Goals
Always begin with the end in mind: ask yourself, what does success look like for me and my business? Once you are clear about your goals, then ROI can be measured in a variety of ways:
through online community, customer acquisition, lead generation, clicks, revenue, contest entries, email newsletter sign ups, online purchases, filled-out contact forms, link clicks, PDF downloads, social interactions, video views, reach, website traffic, customer conversion rate and more. Your choice of measures really depends on your goals. Then remember – everything is a process and not because social media is 24/7 means that your results will be instant. So make sure your goals have a reasonable time horizon.

#2 Determine the Right Platforms
Your social media marketing goals and resulting strategy must align with the relevant platforms. So the question is, do you know where your current and potential customers are spending their time online? In determining your target market, you must figure out who they are, what platforms they prefer and how much time they spend there. They you can find platforms that are the right fit.

#3 Track Campaigns
So you have set your goals, formulated a strategy and you’re executing your plan on the right and relevant platforms and running your campaigns. Now it’s time to track everything -from the time spent, cost of ads, etc., as well as the activities and campaigns. Monitoring your social media is crucial for determining your ROI. There are a variety of tools you can use to do this. – Facebook Insights, Twitter Insights, free Google Analytics, Hootsuite (which is beyond scheduling), Klout, Socialbakers and Bitly, which allows you to customize shortened links so you can track everything you share.

#4 Generate a Report of The Findings
Whether you are doing it in-house via a consultant or agency, you need to determine a way to generate a comprehensive Social Media Report on your results. You will also want to come up with a time frame that makes sense for you – weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly or all of the above. Your Report should also include platform distribution, as well as qualitative and quantitative metrics, sentiment and results for specific social sites.

#5 Review Results and Reset Goals
Once you have your stats in front of you, you can calculate your Social Media ROI and review the results of your marketing to see what worked and didn’t work in terms of meeting the goals you set. If you did paid advertising, that’s important to measure as well, because it relates to a specific cost.

Here is a great resource you can read if you want to get more granular and mathematical on calculation of your Social Media ROI – An In-Depth Guide on How to Calculate the ROI of a Social Media Campaign: On 60 Second Marketer, Jamie Turner

Remember, start with the end in mind, measure, track, report and then see if you need to adjust your goals, or your plan.

And do tell, what are the social platforms you’ve had the greatest successes on? Leave your Comments below.

For more on Ingrid, go to: getconnectid.com