More and more businesses, professionals and individuals have started using the social media for the purpose of acquiring new customers, building their brand and also for selling and creating awareness of their products and services. However, there seems to be one area where they have yet to make improvements and that is: measuring ROI (return on investment). A few months back, Mashable published a blog post that talks about how online marketers are not measuring ROI on their social media marketing (SMM) campaigns.
Online Marketers Do Not Measure ROI For Their Social Media Camapaigns
There are many online marketers that are observing their SMM campaigns for only direct measurable results, however doing so will not provide a measurement of ROI. It will only show the improvements in the results of their overall SMM initiatives.
The Measurable Social Media Metrics
Listed below are some SMM metrics that are measurable:
- An increase in the number of Twitter followers
- An increase in the number of Facebook fans
- Analytics: overall Page Views, bounce rates and time spent on site
- Improvements in search rankings
- Backlinks
- Comments, pings and trackbacks
These metrics provide important information that shows whether an SMM campaign is successful, however it does not clearly show the results of the campaign. Most of the businesses and executives look for financial implications of running such campaigns. ROI can be directly measured using business metrics like new sales leads, increased business (sales), decrease in expenses and increased profitability.
How Should You Measure ROI for SMM Campaigns
The best way to measure ROI from your SMM campaigns is to create visual charts (graphs etc.) of the most important metrics that show results over time and then overlay with the key financial results. Here is an example:
Create a graph that contains an increase in the brand or product mentions over a period of several months against the monthly sales. This graph will let you see a direct correlation to an increase in mentions with an increase in sales. Overlay these results from various SMM campaigns and channels. When you look at the graph, you will be easily able to determine which campaigns and channels are having the best impact.