Social Media ROI and Metrics

Most businesses and organizations understand just how valuable social media is to their brands but the question is are you getting exactly your money and time’s worth? This article emphasizes the use of metrics in social media ROI (Return on Investment) which enables brands to measure the return on investment in relation to social media. Just how much time should you spend using your social media platforms and how much do you gain from doing so?

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How to Measure Social Media ROI with the Use of Metrics

Sharing Your Voice

The first step is sharing your voice. This helps in determining the percentage of mentions your brand gets within your industry. When sharing your voice, you can see how many mentions you receive daily in comparison to other companies in the same industry. For example, if your mentions per day increase by 20 tweets you may see this as progress but with sharing your voice, you can see another company in the same industry gets about 500 mentions per day. With this tool, you can fully see your market and potential. You are able to determine how big your market is and what percentage of this market you are actually reaching.

Referrals

Referrals are another metric tool in social media ROI. Fortunately, Google Analytics makes this process easier on your website. With Google Analytics social media traffic sources tool you are able to determine how many people actually click on your company’s website through social media referrals. Therefore, you know what links are most effective in leading people to your website which should be the goal. You are able to determine what social media site generates the most traffic and referrals for your website. Three ways to improve your click rates are frequency, timing and posting to multiple sites.

Conversion Rate

Conversion rate is another metric tool important in social media ROI. You have to find out whether the amount of time you spend on your social media site actually generates reasonable results. An example is if you spend hours making a newsletter and if this newsletter does not increase the traffic to your site, it is a problem. There are two elements on Google Analytics that can help you do this: Google Analytic Goals and Advanced Traffic Segments. Google explains Analytic Goals as a “versatile way to measure how well your site or app fulfills your target objectives”. For more help on Google Analytic Goals check this out on Google Support . Advanced traffic segments function as a tool to break your analytic data by individual traffic source.

Giving Back & Social Media ROI

Giving back is another way to tackle Social Media ROI. Often we concentrate on getting. Getting many likes, retweets or shares. The question we need to ask is how many of us are giving. How many brands actually do these same things in return? If we want people to like, share and retweet our content we have to endeavor to do the same for another people. Look for opportunities to engage with major influencers on your social network feeds. A good way to track these major influencers is to use twitter lists and creating Google + circles that are properly named and labeled. When sharing anything make sure to credit the source and add a good word for good measure. When liking and commenting, you can do so thoughtfully by actually writing things that show that you are interested in the article or posts. This also means not just saying, “I liked your post. Very informative!” Say why you liked it and in what way you thought it was informative.

The Social Media ROI topic is a vast one. This post concentrates on using metrics to determine ROI. Metrics should also be used to learn and improve, with a better plan you get better results! Hopefully the tools mentioned are helpful in getting the most out of your social media bandwidth.