By Pius Boachie
Small businesses are beginning to understand the value of social media, but often wonder how to measure return on investment from social media marketing. This is very simple. Use the three keys below to measure your social media ROI and amplify your marketing efforts to speed past competitors or completely kick them off the market (your choice).
1. Create Your Key Performance Indicators (KPI)
To measure ROI accurately, specific goals need to be created and followed. How would you describe success for your social media marketing efforts? What results would you like to see out of your social campaigns? Citing myself as an example, the goals of my social media marketing efforts are listed below:
- Branding purposes (thought leadership)
- Increasing traffic to website
- Generating leads
What about you? Your goals are key performance indicators (KPIs); they are metrics you use in analyzing your efforts. Common big picture goals for social media marketing and small steps to achieve them can be found below.
Big picture goals or KPIs:
- Increase in traffic to the business website
- Increase in sales and revenue
- Decrease in cost of marketing
Small steps to achieving KPIs:
- Increase in engagement
- Having a voice or presence on social media
- Interaction with customers
- Generating more customers or leads
- Increase in Followers/Likes/Fans
Choose any of the above for measuring your KPIs.
2. Determine How To Measure Your Goals or Key Performance Indicators (KPI)
Goals are more likely to be achieved when metrics are set. So you need to choose ways to measure and understand how your KPIs are performing. For example, a business that wants to increase website traffic would have to measure and compare the amount of incoming traffic over a set period of time.
Ways of measuring your KPIs:
- Google Analytics – In Google Analytics, go to Acquisition > All traffic > Channels
- Social analytics – Twitter analytics and Facebook Insights
- UTM parameters – Useful for measuring specific social channels and links
- Social Bakers – An analytics tool for social media marketers
- Simply Measured – An analytics tool for social media marketers
- Hubspot – A
CRM tool - Discounts – Measure by looking at the number of discount purchases.
A complete guide to UTM parameters and usage can be found on the Buffer blog.
3. Review and Repeat
Finally with a clear understanding of your goals, KPIs and analytics to measure your social media marketing campaigns, your business should be on a clear way to success. Constantly review your analytics, make adjustments and necessary changes to your strategy over a specific period of time.
Do not waste precious hours every day on reviewing statistics or channels, determine when and what channels need to be reviewed. For example, I review Facebook page insights every week, check Twitter analytics every month and review Google analytics every two weeks. Using the reports from your analytics dashboard, you can determine what channels work and amplify your efforts on those channels.
