Measuring Social Media ROI

The number of social media platforms available for businesses has significantly grown with Snapchat, Facebook to Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest at the helm. 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.
Many brands have it in their mindset that ROI is financial and for many it is, but ROI 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.

What are your KPIs?

When implementing social media it is firstly important to identify the metrics that are most important to you, what is it you want to achieve?

• Brand Awreness
• Conversions
• Website visits

Your KPI’s 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.

Align Your Social Media Strategy with your Business Objectives.

You’ve identified your KPI’s, so it’s now important that your social media strategy is aligned with your KPI’s. If you’re looking to generate more awareness of your brand, then you’d look to create a value-based content strategy backed by paid social to retrieve as many impressions as possible. 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.

Utilize Google Analytics & Social Pixels

The next important step is to ensure you can track website activity from your social channels. For any website, it is best practice that you have Google Analytics set up and whenever your running any social media campaigns you want to track the activity from them, then leverage UTM codes, which allows you to track activity of users who come to your website from a specific ad or post.

It is also recommended that you 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.

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.

Always remember that 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.