Measuring Social Media ROI

Measuring Social

Media ROI

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In a 2012 survey conducted by management and digital consulting firm, PulsePoint Group and the Economist Intelligence Unit over 329 senior executives in North America, almost half of the surveyed executives mentioned the absence of a standardized metric to measure return on investment (ROI) as the major impediment to social media campaigns even though such campaigns did help to increase their market share. The main problem in measuring the social ROI is the difficulty to monetize and connect it to actual business results. Though most companies focus on website visits, newsletter subscribers, calls and sales, it can be difficult to measure performance based on page likes, shares, tweets and other social signals.

However, there are some methods that can be used to measure social media ROI.

Soft Leads V/s Hard Leads To measure social ROI, it is very important to understand the two types of leads - soft and hard.

*Soft Leads* These leads will most likely not result in a purchase immediately and will require a good amount of nurturing.

*Hard Leads* These are actual paying customers. With hard leads, you can measure the quantum of your sales, how much revenue you earn, and how much money and effort you put into your marketing campaigns. All this will help determine the actual ROI.

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Social networking platforms are ideal when it comes to spreading brand awareness and gathering potential customer information, and both activities generate soft leads. However, businesses find it difficult to measure ROI for social networking campaigns with soft leads.

One method to measure ROI from social networking is to use gated content, which can be accessed only by providing contact details. You can provide different types of valuable content such as white papers, case studies, webinars and so on to encourage potential customers to provide their details.

But, this will only generate soft leads. If you want to generate and measure hard leads, you should post overtly promotional content on social networking sites and link directly to the sign-up page for your product or service.

However, this defies the principle underlying legitimate content marketing - providing valuable, non-promotional content.

Although built-in platform analytic tools with certain social networking sites such as Facebook Insights, LinkedIn Company Page Insights, and Pinterest Web Analytics provide metrics for tracking engagement, they are good at only measuring performance within that particular platform. These tools are not very helpful in determining the traffic being driven to your business website, conversions and lead generations.

Here are some options to measure social ROI more effectively.

Facebook Offers This is a useful feature available in Facebook to convert social actions to offline sales to generate hard leads. Businesses and brands can share discounts with their customers by creating an offer on their Facebook page.

Customers can claim the offers by clicking the ‘Get Offer’ option. When someone claims an offer, the discount (online coupon) will be sent to them through the primary email address associated with their Facebook account.

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The customer can then redeem the coupon offline from the physical location of the business. This allows marketers to monetize social media actions into in-store purchases.

Source: Screenshot taken from Official Facebook Page

Google Analytics This is the most powerful tool available to measure social ROI. It will provide you with social reports which give a clear picture of how social activities impact your business. You can view and analyze the following social reports with Google Analytics.

Overview Report

- This report gives an overall view of how much

conversion value is generated from various social networking sites used to implement your marketing campaigns. It also gives you a ‘Social Value’ graph that compares the number and monetary value of all goal completions with those from social referrals.

Network Referrals

–

Network

referrals

allow

you

to

view

engagement metrics such as Pageviews, Average visit duration and Pages/Visit for traffic coming from each social site. This will help you find out which social networking site got the highest quality traffic.

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Datahub Activity Report – Using this report, you can understand what people are saying about your content on social networking sites and how they are engaging with it. You can view the most recently shared URLs by people, how and where they have shared them, and what they have said.

Landing Pages

– This shows you the engagement metrics for each

URL. You can identify your most popular content by sorting by data hub activities displayed in the table.

Trackbacks Report

– This report displays the list of sites that are

linking to your content and in which context they are being linked. This will help you locate the content that was most successful.

Conversions Report

–

You

can

view

the

total

number

of

conversions and the monetary value of conversions due to the referrals from each social networking site. It is possible to view how each network has contributed to conversions and revenue through assists (someone visits your site, leaves without a conversion, then returns later to convert during a subsequent visit) and last clicks.

Plugins

– This allows you to know which social share buttons (‘like’,

‘+1) are being clicked and for which content. This will tell you which articles are the most ‘liked’ or ‘shared’ and from which social sites they are being ‘liked’ or ‘shared’.

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Visitors Flow

– This shows you the initial paths that visitors take to

get to your website from social networks. With this, you can determine whether visitors from each social networking site entered your site through the product pages (created for promoting your product), whether they hung on to other parts of the site, or exited.

Oktopost This system incorporates ‘Lead Capture Technology’ that allows companies to view their actual social ROI and powerful granular level metrics such as clicks, conversions, comments and so on. Every time a lead is generated from an Oktopost link, this system can show you exactly from which post, social profile and LinkedIn discussion group that lead came from. The campaign tracking analytics allows you to click on any of your campaigns to see a quick snapshot

of

its

performance.

It

is

also

possible

to

view

individual

click/conversion reports for each post in the campaign. The platform lets you compare performance by clicks and conversion.

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Oktopost also offers Google Analytics integration. After you set up the integration, you can view all Oktopost driven traffic in your Google Analytics dashboard.

Having a list of leads generated from social networks and the ability to measure the social ROI is crucial for social media marketing as these prove the real business value of social media. A professional SEO company with expertise in social media optimization can help you use these measures properly, understand the reasons for the fluctuations in social ROI, and utilize this information to chart your marketing campaign.

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