Many brands and individuals are starting a social media marketing campaign in the hopes of building awareness, generate sales leads and building a community, but how do they measure and check if their efforts are paying off? How are you currently measuring the true ROI of your social media campaign?
It’s a fact that not many are measuring the ROI of social media simply because that they don’t know how to do it. Many are also trying to see if they can measure it with direct vanity metrics. This might give you some sort of indication of the success of your campaign, but in reality it doesn’t translate into concrete statistics. Here’s a list of some vanity metrics people are using.
Vanity metrics brands are using
- Facebook likes
- Facebook shares
- Facebook comments
- Retweets
- Followers on Twitter
- Number of tweets
- LinkedIn followers
- LinkedIn group members
- Google+ followers
- Google+ +1’s
- Brand mentions on social channels
- Traffic from social media channels
- Shares on social media channels
These might look great in determining if your campaign is working, but they fail directly to show you if you actually generate any form of business from social media. Many times, managers and owners are looking for direct results can that can show financial impact and improvements. ROI always needs to be integrated directly in your marketing reports to showcase increase in leads, sales and all the expenses it can be measured against.
The easiest way to do this is to create a simple spreadsheet with graphs that include key social media indicators that can showcase results over a specific time period and then integrate this with your business goals and objectives.
One way you can do this is to measure the increase in traffic to your website over the past year from social media channels and the conversions generated from this traffic. This means you need solid goals on Google Analytics or other measurement apps to measure the conversions of your website.
