How to Measure Social Media ROI

The significant growth in social media platforms has made it more accessible for businesses to communicate, connect and engage with their audience across social channels such as Facebook, Snapchat, Pinterest to Instagram and LinkedIn. If you want to remain competitive then social media marketing is an integral part of any businesses marketing strategy.

However the one problem for many brands is that there’s potential for them to waste a lot of time and money on these social channels if they aren’t being utilized effectively or failing to measure their social media performance correctly. It’s important to acknowledge that ROI isn’t always financially driven, it can be anything from conversions, to brand awareness and engagement metrics and these are just as important to your brand. So to ensure your social media marketing efforts are making an impact check out these handy guidelines to measure social media ROI.

What are Your KPIs?

It’s important to identify your key performance indicators which will be your metrics you can measure when implementing your social media strategy. So what is you want to achieve? Some common KPIs are:

• Engagement
• Conversions
• Website Visits
• Reach
• Brand Awareness

Align your Social Media with your Business Objectives

Your KPIs should ultimately align with your business goals. By defining these key performance indicators (KPIs) will help you to keep focus on how you can align your social media marketing and strategy, thus keeping to clear goals and not getting side tracked from metrics that aren’t important to you.So for example, if your looking to increase awareness then you’ll want to ensure you include impressions and engagement as a KPI.

Facebook provides many objectives for your to ensure your strategy is aligned with your objectives so be sure to choose the right one for you.

Take Advantage of Google Analytics & Social Pixels

It’s important you can track website activity from your social channels. It’s best practice for any website that you have Google Analytics set up so that you can track traffic from each social channel your activity running.  If your running any particular campaigns you can track the activity from them specifically by utilizing  UTM codes, which helps you track the activity of users who’ve come to your website from a specific ad or post.

Choosing not to use UTMs on social means your traffic will fall under ‘referrer’ in your Google Analytics acquisition overview so it then becomes difficult to assess the effectiveness of your social activity and what’s working and what is not.

The next step is to take advantage of the Facebook Pixel. This is a little snippet of code that you embed on your website, that tracks Facebook users that visit your site, helping you to understand and gain a better awareness of the demographics of your audience to help you with better targeting processes for upcoming social media campaigns The Facebook pixel will also aid you in tracking the number of users who converted after viewing any Facebook ads your running – even if they didn’t actually click on the ad itself.

Monitor & Track your Analytics

The most valuable part now is to track your social media activities and the effectiveness of these, after all how else will you measure your social media ROI. By tracking your monthly activity across your social platforms you’ll be able to view your performance month-over-month, whilst comparing the KPI’s you have identified. How to report your metrics is up to you so you can choose to create your own reporting system or leverage tools like Google Analytics and Hubspot to blend reports together, helping you to delve into your metrics and see if your achieving your KPI’s. Your data can be taken from Google analytics of Facebook Insights.

Measuring social media ROI will not always be easy, but should be made relatively more easier by having clear social media KPI’s and aligning these with your business objectives. This will be able to show you how effective your social media marketing is whilst identifying areas for improvement for you to meet your KPIs and effectively monitor youe social media ROI.

If you believe your not utilizing your social media effectively then why not get in contact today for a friendly chat and we’ll discuss how we can help you achieve a better social media ROI.