How to Measure the ROI Basics of Social Media

Guest blogger Melinda Venable, Social Media Consultant
Now that social media has entered the business end of the audiovisual industry, gone are the days when just having a presence and posting a few times a week justifies its continued time suck. If you are spending time, money and resources on social media, what is the value you are getting out of it? Measuring ROI can be challenging, but if you can simplify your process, you will be able to track your effectiveness, keep your finger on the pulse of the AV Industry, and make decisions based on insights you get from your social media platforms like Facebook and [The] Twitter.

Start with the end in mind, by outlining your objectives

To figure out your basic ROI on social media, start by thinking about the outcomes that you are trying to achieve. If increasing sales comes to mind first, then maybe that is your end goal. Now work backward and define the influences and actions that contribute to making a sale happen. Are you hoping to reach new prospects and start a conversation with them? Do you need to improve your relationship with your existing customers to increase their loyalty and word of mouth? Are you hoping to form new business partnerships and network with key individuals?

Each of these actions and influences should be articulated as distinct measurable objectives. Let’s take the example of needing to reach new prospects. We can presume that you need to keep a certain number of new prospects in your sales pipeline per quarter and that your marketing strategy includes who qualifies as a solid prospect. With some investigative research, find them on Facebook and/or Twitter and make it an objective to learn more about them and start a conversation.

All of this activity should roll up to a measurable objective like this: Find and recruit 20 new qualified prospects as followers on Twitter and 20 new likes on Facebook per month. For this example, 20 new prospects represent the metric that you will track and measure. Think of it like a sales goal or quota.

Let’s take another example objective – Improve the relationships with existing customers so that they will increase their loyalty and word of mouth. Showing loyalty can be demonstrated by your customers in many ways: from being an advocate and frequent commenter on your business’ Facebook page, to clicking through on a link about a new promotion. What can you do to reward their behavior?

Your part comes in by providing well-planned, engaging and valued content, and listening and responding on a consistent basis. In this case, your measurable objective could be: Provide engaging content daily and respond to comments and questions in order to yield at least 100 comments on Facebook and 50 @mentions on Twitter per quarter.

Shoot for a number

Hopefully, you are starting to get some ideas on how to create specific measurable objectives that will help you achieve your end goals. One common question at this point is figuring out what number to shoot for. Is 20 a good number? 200? It may seem so arbitrary, but in fact, you can make some good educated predictions just like you do in estimating sales quotas. One starting point is by looking at your competition or a similar sized organization: How many comments are they getting a week on their Facebook page? Be sure to look at proportional numbers by doing a quick percentage calculation of the size of their community versus the number of comments. How does this compare to your current numbers?

Document your numbers and notes

Once you’ve determined all of your measurable objectives, create a simple spreadsheet. Decide the frequency of when you will manually check your numbers and be consistent. For example, every Monday.

Document your current numbers as your “before” benchmark for each metric. Include a notes column by each objective’s metric to document observations about peaks or valleys. As you diligently track your progress over time, you should begin to observe what kinds of content, file types, events, etc are pulling in the most new visitors and engagement and compare to what is not getting response.

Try some easy tools to track your clicks, likes, and mentions

There are many tools available to measure social media progress. For those who are just starting to monitor their numbers, like a new exercise resolution, it’s best to keep things simple and consistent.
Here are three easy-to-use, free tools that will help you measure your progress:

SocialMention – this tool tracks how many mentions your product, company or hashtag has received over a specified timeframe. Enter your keyword in the search field and results will show the real-time number of mentions (@mentions or retweets) on one or all platforms during a specified timeframe. Track this number periodically if your objective is to increase your product’s exposure and attract new community members. You can also see who your biggest advocates are and their influence level.
Facebook Insights – built right into the platform, this tool tracks many different metrics about your unique community and content, such as the number of new fans gained or lost over specified time period or the content file type or topic that yields the highest number of people “talking about this.” If you’re interested in building up your audience in certain demographic regions, or males vs females, for example, the Insights data will provide these insights. You must be a page administrator to view the data which is accessed via the “Insights” link under your brand’s profile photo on the left side of your Facebook page.
Bitly – this is a tool that creates trackable, shortened links that you can post on any platform. You can track how many people clicked on your posted link over a specified timeframe. If one of your objectives is to generate interest for a new product or service and you have a video or infographic to post, you can create a custom short URL using the bitly tool and be able to track how many people clicked on this link.

Numbers that are important to one group may not matter to another. It may take some exploration to find the right combination of tools that correspond to the exact metrics that are essential to you. Beyond the above mentioned basic tools, this wiki lists an extensive collection of measurement and monitoring solutions, both free and paid. Social media should be part of your overall marketing strategy as long as it is helping you achieve your business objectives.

What tools or processes are you using to track your social media programs? Let us know in the comments.

Measuring Social Media ROI: 3 Things to Consider (socialmaximizer.com)
What’s Your Social Media Policy? (pkaudiovisual.com)
My Top Ten Twitter Tools (pkaudiovisual.com)