How to measure the ROI in social media marketing

The fundamental challenge that is experienced with social media marketing is that there is no general denominator to measure its ROI. As a result this, the value of social media has been evaluated randomly (at best). In some cases, it hasn’t been measured at all. Calculating social media ROI is crucial in securing buy-in in addition to budget for your social media marketing strategy. Being able to quantify the ROI of your social media efforts also demonstrates to you what’s working as well as what’s not. This gives you the ability to shift resources as well as tactics in order to be more successful.

The role of a digital marketer

Assessing the overall success of a number of social media marketing campaigns is a facet of a digital marketer’s job. This is because it’s important to determine how your digital marketing efforts are adding to the company’s bottom line. This being said, according to statistics 70% of businesses who are online – and use social media – aren’t concerned about measuring ROI.

It’s very surprising to discover that the bulk of online organisations are conducting their social media marketing totally in a vacuum. In addition, they don’t have any clue as to the way in which social media makes a contribution to the accomplishments of their business.

Social media ROI is challenging to measure

Even though the ROI of social media is certainly complicated to measure, the attempt needs to be made to quantify this because there is money to be made by using social media. All that is required for social media to develop into a profitable marketing channel is:

• A lot of measurement,
• Strategy reconstruction, as well as
• Engagement.

It certainly isn’t as simple to see a good ROI from social media efforts as it is if you’re using a pay-per-click (PPC) or, alternatively, a local search campaign. This is owing to the fact that there is a very direct correlation between the success as well as failure of a PPC campaign: it refers traffic to your website or it doesn’t. With social media networks, there are a lot of “vanity” metrics which come into play.

What, exactly, are vanity metrics in social media?

The term ‘vanity metrics’ incorporates data such as the following:

• Social media followers,
• Pageviews, as well as
• Subscribers.

These analytics are extremely satisfying on paper but these don’t do anything positive for your organisational goals. In other words, vanity metrics offer positive reporting but do not provide any context for future marketing decisions.

Don’t believe us? Have a look at these.

1. Facebook Fans

Engagement rates for branded Facebook Pages have decreased by more than 20%. The more that businesses put content onto Facebook, the more that other organisations are required to share newsfeed space. This conundrum translates into the less which users see as well as consume from any one organisation. This means that – regardless of the number of people who have clicked “Like” when they’re on a brand’s Page – the majority of them don’t return to the Page itself nor do they see the content in their newsfeeds.

2. Twitter Followers

On this social media network, it definitely shouldn’t be about the number of followers that you have. People often follow random accounts for purposes that are not related to their actual interest in these accounts. A lot of Twitter users, for example, will follow you because they want you to follow them back. If you don’t reciprocate, you’ll often find that you lose that follower a couple of days later.

3. Blog Post Page Views

This figure shows that you’ve succeeded in founding yourself as a thought leader. In addition to this, you’ve designed great content. These are both good first steps in an inbound marketing plan. However, page views don’t demonstrate:

• The place that these views are coming from,
• If the page answers a reader’s questions, or – alternatively
• Even the time that they spent on that page.

4. Email Open Rate

The term ‘open rate’ refers to a measurement which is reasonable to track to determine the success of the subject line of your email in addition to timing. Nevertheless, there are technical limitations to email open rates as many email clients have to load images to count as an open. Many users turn images off. Track this metric but don’t fixate about it.

5. Number of Subscribers or Product Users

It’s easy to track the number of people who have converted into a trial user or consented to receive your newsletter. However, are people actually consuming your product as well as content? Oftentimes a product demo or email goes unused or, alternatively, unseen.

Don’t fret if the results that your brand gets differ significantly from your competition. The fundamental thing is to consistently work towards enhancing your social media ROI.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

Want to know more about social media marketing? If so, then doing our Social Media Marketing Course is a superb idea! Follow this link for more information.