88% of marketing professionals feel they cannot measure social ROI accurately.
Fast Company cites an Adobe white paper that says 88% of 750 surveyed marketing professionals didn’t feel they could accurately measure the effectiveness of their social media campaigns.
A recent survey by iContact discovered that for companies using social media, the most common challenges were lack of time or knowledge and uncertainty about how to measure ROI.
Difficulties in attributing direct returns from investment is social media can be difficult, due to the fact that last-click attribution models are not necessarily a good reflection of social media marketing success as social campaigns are often developed to increase overall engagement and brand awareness.
As a result, many social media marketers have tried to develop the return on investment paradigm into one more applicable for the social space. This has spawned such terms as return on influence, return on engagement and return on conversation. The theory behind these terms is sound, however, whether ROI is an appropriate term for social media or not, it is the measure of success for a business.
The following are a few of the many methods of measuring social media marketing success, which may be applicable for your business:
Metric Tools
Todd Wasserman, for Mashable., states that:
“If a customer clicks [on a Facebook post] and then goes on your site to register, then you have proof that the ad was at least effective for that. Of course, the ideal scenario is when a customer clicks through an ad and then buys something on your site.”
Wasserman goes on to suggest that using multiple tools simultaneously is the best route as it allows you to monitor click-throughs from social media profiles to your website. From here (assuming this is in-line with your business model), one can calculate conversion rates from social click-throughs thus giving an indication of social ROI.
However, it’s not always easy to tell what actions on these social media cites have driven that traffic, or how much that traffic truly cost. Using a tool such as Pagelever can at least give an indication of the most popular Facebook book posts and give an estimate of the half-life of a post, thus enabling a marketer to determine optimum timing for posts.
Interactions & Engagement
If your social strategy is to increase reach and awareness then perhaps interactions and engagement are an appropriate judge of return on investment.
Michael Cohn, for Social Media Today, explains that engagement measures such as likes or re-tweets are relavent, when you are able to understand what each one means for your business.
“Every single comment, photo, video or post takes a few seconds for a user to digest,” writes Cohn. “It is estimated that the average ‘like’ on Facebook takes seven seconds per person while close friends of this person will take an average of five seconds to digest that ‘like.’”
Analysing post likes or total reach for tweets or posts gives on indication of the number of people which your brand message reached. From here, a social media marketer is able to determined how many people were reached for the total investment in that social media post.
If you have difficulty in measuring ROI or would like strategic advice on how to maximise social ROI, say hello!