If you feel like you spend hours upon hours of time on Social Media Campaigns and you struggle to determine if it is successful… you are not alone! Many struggle with this and I am here to make some sense of this conundrum. ROI is merely the validation which shows your marketing efforts are effective and bringing the expected results. Here are a few ROI tactics:
Set Social Media Goals
Whether you want to track customer sales, lead generation, revenue, clicks, followers or likes… you must determine what is your ultimate goal. This will help you to identify your short comings and show what success looks like… not to mention saving time.
Determine The Right Platform
Your Social Media goals and resulting strategies must align with the platforms you use. Some fans or demographics are mainly on Facebook, others on Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram or Google+. If you find where your audience spends their time, you can position your efforts in the same space or platform in order to connect with them.
Track Your Campaigns
To quantify the effort made, you need to track time spent, A/B testing, costs and the results of your campaigns. There are a ton of tools that can help you with the reporting and many are free or very reasonably priced. Some of the popular metrics include: audience size, interaction (often referred to as engagement), your activity, clicks, actions of others and unique visitors.
Report Your Findings
Come up with length of reporting time which makes sense to your situation. Reporting can be produced weekly, monthly or quarterly or a custom period based on your goals. Track your results against time to see trends.
Review Your Results / Adjust Goals
Once you have the hard numbers, you now can calculate your ROI and examine the results. Over time, you can see what is effective and what didn’t work. This will allow you to examine your goals and see how closely you came to hitting your mark… and adjust if necessary.
Social Media ROI is simply a numbers game when it comes to tracking measurables. It should never have it’s focus on somewhat intangible concepts like brand awareness. Track finite aspects, adjust and re-target to hit your goals as you move forward.
