How to measure ROI on social media

One of the questions our clients often ask us is how they can measure the ROI on social media – and it’s one that is difficult to answer. The thing is, social media is not about sales – so there are no hits:revenue ratios to take into account. Instead it’s about building relationships with people, raising your profile and making contacts, and from there, you may well get sales – but the social media may only be one element of the marketing that results in a sale.

However, to get some idea of how effective your social media marketing is, you do need to set objectives. There’s no hard and fast rule about the goals you should set, and really it depends on the type of your business and the aims you have for your use of social media. For example, you might want to achieve any (or all!) of the following:

• To increase sales
• To increase traffic to your website
• To raise the profile of your business
• To spread news or information about your industry
• To gain new contacts
• To find suppliers
• To find partners or financial backers
• To improve your website’s SEO
• To have a bit of fun!

Before you start using social media to market your business do think about what you want to achieve, because then you can start to set some measureable targets. For instance, if your main objective is to increase your contact database then the most important thing to measure is the number of people you follow and the number of followers you have (or the number of “Likes” your Facebook page gets). On the other hand, if you’re looking for more sales then you’d be better off targeting a smaller number of more specific people and building a relationship with them – so follower numbers won’t be so important.

There are lots of factors you can measure to get some idea of how well your social media marketing is working. As well as followers and Facebook likes you can monitor shares, retweets and comments/replies to get a feel for how well your followers are engaging with your material. You also need to keep a close eye on your website metrics – you should be able to see where visitors come from and can tie that up with your social media data to give you a powerful picture of how effective your campaign is.

Once you’ve built up a strong following on social media networks – and that should always be your first objective – perhaps the easiest way to measure ROI on social media is to run a defined campaign to promote a special offer. Build a landing page that you use in all your social media mentions – or different pages for the different platforms – and use special offer codes too. That way you can directly measure traffic and sales and see where it originates, and that should give you a good idea of how well social media is working for you.

For more help with social media give the team at HodgesNet a call on 01793 608777 today.

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net