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Measuring Social ROI

By Snap Agency August 2, 2018

As a business, social media is an excellent tool that, when utilized correctly, will act as a digital extension of your brand. No matter what your offerings are, you should be using social campaigns to interact with your consumers and reach new markets. Not only is social media marketing a fantastic way to further cultivate a connection with your customers, but it’s also a great means of reaching your business goals. However, running social accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, or any other social media platform can be a lot of work. You want to make sure that you’re seeing a strong return on your investment when it comes to social marketing.

As a social media marketing agency, Snap has years of experience in helping clients succeed in the social media space. Today we’ve written a how-to guide that should be able to assist you in correctly measuring your social media ROI. We’ll talk about how to make sure you’re getting the biggest bang for your buck when it comes your social media marketing, as well as the online metrics to focus on to see if your pursuits are performing at the level you want.  

What is Social ROI?

Social ROI is exactly what it sounds like. It’s the positive attributes you’re seeing in return for the money, effort, and time you’re putting into your social accounts. While this may sound tricky to measure, it’s actually quite simple as long as you plan ahead before implementing your social media strategies. The key to a solid social strategy is to make sure it aligns properly with your overarching business goals. To effectively do this, you’re going to need to identify your key performance indicators (KPIs).

KPIs are how you measure the success of your social media marketing campaigns. Obviously, your key performance indicators should be measurable, as well as in-line with your business objectives. Most social campaign goals involve either trying to drive conversions or increase brand awareness.

Measuring Awareness

For awareness, your KPIs can take the form of the total reach a post receives, as well as clicks, retweets, shares, or any other engagements. You can choose to utilize either each social site’s native analytics or Google Analytics (G.A). Using native social analytics can help to track engagements such as clicks, likes, shares, and comments while Google Analytics will track traffic to your site, demographics, and the behavior of the user that originated from social (such as what pages they land on, etc).

G.A. has a great feature that allows you to divide your “owned social” vs. your “earned social.” Owned social is how many online users clicked on a link from your post that you shared, while earned social is how many clicked on a link from your social campaign that was shared by a different user. This is a great way to measure the total scope of your campaign, as well as to fine tune your strategies to reach the largest audience. A common theme for businesses these days is to post giveaways on Instagram that encourage following their feed and tagging friends to boost awareness. “Retweet this post for a chance to win…” is another tactic.

Measuring Conversions

Conversions can take many different forms, such as a purchase, downloading an eBook, or signing up for your newsletter. For this example, we’ll look at driving revenue through purchases. Just as with building your awareness, Google Analytics can be utilized for tracking conversions as well. Using UTM (Urchin Traffic Monitors) trackers, which can help you pinpoint exactly where the conversions are (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), you can identify which social campaigns are giving you the best ROI and which need to be altered or even scrapped.

One of G.A.’s coolest conversion features is its ability to decipher which conversions came exactly from your social post, and which were “assisted.” An assisted conversion occurs when the user who originally clicked on your social post leaves without committing to a purchase, or an email sign-up or download. However, they later return to the site and make the conversion. This way, you can keep track of the success of social posts in terms of generating interest and eventually leading to the desired action. Additionally, by adding a Facebook tracking pixel, or the equivalent on any social platform that does advertising, you can use the native social source to help you track conversions.

Get Started Today

Social ROI is an essential part of your social media campaigns. With 7 out of every 10 Americans on social media these days, it’s important that your brand is visible on these sites and you’re your business is social savvy. Your presence on social media platforms should be used to its full potential in terms of assisting you in accomplishing your business goals.

Of course, it’s impossible to master the art of social media marketing in a day. In fact, with new updates seemingly appearing weekly for our favorite apps, there is always constant need for learning and adapting within this marketing avenue. If you’re serious about fully integrating your business with social, contact our social media experts today and we’ll work with you to improve your social ROI.