How to Start Monitoring your R.O.I from Social Media
by Adam Mitchell on 06/09/10 at 7:57 am
4 comments
How to measure return on investment from social media has got to be one of the most commonly asked questions regarding social media marketing. It is also one of the trickiest topics to define a single solution for, as it depends heavily on your influence within a community of people.
We are all brand ambassadors talking to our friends and family about experiences we have with brands whether good or bad. We do this almost every day and the viral effect does influence purchase decisions for many people.
Positive influence in a social network or community has a snowball effect that’s return for your brand can be invaluable. Here are a few guidelines to get you started, using social media to drive traffic to your e-commence store, website, blog or place of your considered conversion.
Know your beginning in order to track your progress. How long or at what rate is your community growing and what is your influence or reach? Your primary goals should be to:
- Share company updates that your community would want to know about or would benefit from.
- Provide real-time customer support
- Build lasting relationships
Determine your Key Performance Indicators (KPI) for your social media activity, this could be Facebook likes, Twitter retweets or mentions, subscriptions, comments, sales, sign-ups, Digg’s or whatever have you. Measure your KPI’s on a daily, weekly and monthly basis to provide data of growth and development within your network.
Use Facebook page insights to analyse data of your community such as: activity, likes, demographics of your audience, media consumption and interactions. When running campaigns on Facebook, there are further means one can use to track return such as purchases or sign ups. On Twitter you are sharing links and these can be tracked using tools such as Hootsuite, bit.ly, TweetDeck, and many others to monitor page views or clicks on your links. This is a powerful way of driving traffic to your website and congruently driving sales, which can be measured through analytical data. To measure your influence and reach on Twitter, you can make use of Twittergrader or Klout. They both generate scores of your twitter account based on various resonance factors within your community.
Financial investment on development and daily time spent interacting and providing quality content, versus the strength of your consumers/leads should tell you if you are doing something right. Use the data you accumulate and determine if the information correlates to an increase in sales or converted leads.
Have you used your social platforms to drive traffic to your e-commerce store, list of service, website or charity? Have they all showed return with a rise in sales, subscriptions, event turn-outs or whatever your metric of return may be? If the answer is ‘yes’, then continue doing what you are doing and if the answer is ‘no’ then reconsider your social media strategy (ask the audience). Please feel free to share ideas, thoughts and suggestions in the comments area.
Adam Mitchell is a Digital Advertising and Marketing campaign manager at Traffic Brand, a company specialising in pay per click ads on desktop, mobile and social media platforms. Adam also writes for a company blog, his own digital blog AdsMitchell and you can catch him on Twitter. He’ll be focusing on Social Media and Marketing. View more articles by Adam Mitchell.
Tags: business social media, facebook, facebook fan page, facebook marketing, social media, social media for business, Twitter, Twitter for Business
40deuce
Sep 7th, 2010
There’s some great advice in this post Adam.
One of the most important that I find a lot of people forget about is to measure before you start. That way you ca have a base to work from knowing where you’ve gone from the start. Too often people jump into social media and then measure afterwards. While you can see some things from that method, you’ll get much clearer insights into how campaigns are going if you have something to benchmark from where you started at.
Cheers,
Sheldon, community manager for Sysomos
Derrick Bradley
Sep 7th, 2010
I agree with Sheldon. It’s so important to decide on your KPIs before getting started. It’s just as important to change or adapt them as you go too, depending on your situation.
I’d also add that’s its important to monitor some of the more non-tangible returns (not directly measurable) like brand awareness, reputation, and education.
Adam Mitchell
Sep 8th, 2010
Sheldon – spot on, to asses ones success or failure you need to have a benchmark to work from (as mentioned in the post), otherwise one is ‘walking in the dark’. Thanks.
Derrick – ‘adapt to survive’ for sure. Agree with you on keeping an eye on the intangibles too (awareness, education and reputation). Although more difficult to assign a numerical value to, this will assist with the messages one puts out to an audience and whether they are being well received or not. Listening (ORM) to your target market before acting is vital to provide relevant content and get the desired action from an audience.
Thank you both for your time and inputs, much appreciated.
Return on investment vs. net profit | Ideate
Oct 22nd, 2010
[...] ROI is obviously a result tool as well (when you throw together the numbers, you will get a resulting ROI), but it’s generally used as more of a management and comparison tool. You should look at your ROI number and compare it to other options that you could theoretically use the same resources (eg. assets or cash) for. [...]