Here’s how...
It happens all too often. The head of marketing presents the results of a high-visibility social media strategy to the executive team, and the signs look good. The company’s official presence on prominent social networks has lots of friends and followers, the content going out several times a week is getting social traction by way of shares, likes and retweets, and the company blog is getting quoted in a number of industry publications. Then come the inevitable questions—are we getting any business from our efforts? More importantly, can we justify this spend if there’s no bottom line return? The sad reality is that while most executives agree that social media was important for their business and that this trend is here to last, only 12 percent of marketers feel capable of measuring social media return on investment, as per a recent Adobe report. If you or your organization have struggled to make the ROI case for your social media efforts, this primer’s for you, walking through the basic but vital aspects of measuring your social media ROI.
Measuring Engagement: Likes and Follows
Possibly the simplest starting point is to start measuring the basics—your followers on Twitter, the number of likes on Facebook, the shares your posts see—and tracking the growth curves over a period of time to spot trends and correlate them with specific campaigns, both online and offline. This is vital to connecting the dots between a new campaign you may have done online or via your website, and the increase in eyeballs that it resulted in, either directly via followers or indirectly via social shares. If your efforts are prominently focused on Facebook, the Facebook insights dashboard gives you all of the analytics data for your Facebook page, allowing you to understand your audience and how they are reacting to your posts, so you can adjust your tone and messaging to meet their needs. Twitter too has its own analytics dashboard with which you can you can track timeline activity, including tweets that were favorited, retweeted, and replied to, plus it also tracks number of mentions, new followers and newly followed over a period in time. However, if you’re looking to measure the success of a specific keyword or hash tag, there are many tools to help you monitor this such as Brandwatch, TweetReach and Keyhole. Keyhole is particularly useful in that it tracks the reach, exposure, activity and top contributors towards the topic across Twitter, Facebook and Instagram—very handy if you’re tracking a topic for a campaign or event. There’s a free timelimited trial that may be enough to convince you to put down the money for the monthly paid plan. Just keep in mind that while this data is relevant and easy to measure, it shouldn’t be the only thing you look at while arriving at the ROI calculation.
Measuring Ad Effectiveness: Click-through Rate and Impressions
If you’re investing in paid promotions or ads on social media, the click-through rate (CTR) is commonly used to measure the success rate. At its most basic, the CTR explains how often people who see your ad or keyword on a particular site actually click and follow the link, and is expressed as a ratio of clicks to views. Practically every social media site has an ad analysis and reporting section which lets you access these measurements for your promotion spends, and a good idea would be to compare these metrics across the various networks on which you have an official presence. If you haven’t yet started on paid promotions on Facebook or Twitter, a simpler and free tool is Google Analytics, which does a great job tracking the number of visitors to your website, and identifying which channels these visitors are coming from—essentially an insight into how traffic is being driven to your website. Another great tool is Bitly, the link shortener which allows you to track everything you share on social channels? For instance, let’s say you have recently published a valuable whitepaper on trends in your industry, and you post the Bitly link on your Facebook and Twitter feeds, Bitly can measure and report on which channel your visitors used to click through to your whitepaper, which country they’re from and more. You can even integrate Bitly reporting for Buffer, an excellent tool for scheduling content posts on social network. If you’re a keen observer, you will have noticed that I personally use Bitly tracking for all links shared in the Further Reading section to track which links are seeing the most traction from our readers!
Measuring Influence and Sentiment: Your Online Reputation Management
This one is tricky and subject to much debate, since there’s no one accepted way of how to arrive at a number to measure the influence of your company’s social presence. We’ve spoken in the past about tools like Klout, Kred and PeerIndex, and others like Social Authority and BrandWatch that attempt to measure your influence and credibility in your industry. The other aspect is sentiment analysis, the general tone and tenor of conversations surrounding your brands, products and the company at large. Sure, you could run several keyword searches each day across all your social channels, but it’s far easier to look at tools like HootSuite and Social Mention which track what’s happening across your social media accounts from one dashboard. These are great tools to feel the vibe about your brand, and identify issues and customer complaints that may not yet have even been expressed via formal customer service channels.
Beyond Traditional Metrics
It’s easy to follow the metrics I’ve outlined, primarily because they’re easy to assess (given most of them are numbers) and also because they’re somewhat aligned with metrics that are well understood by companies’ marketing departments since they’re already used for other media channels (such as reach and frequency). However, by virtue of social media being fundamentally different from other media channels, you must evolve your own metrics that measure the depth and breadth of relationships between brands and their audiences. Too many organizations place importance on metrics that represent their position in the competitive landscape while overlooking the relational metrics with their community and stakeholders. Sure, comparing how well you’re doing, in terms of fans and followers, against your competition is a useful metric, what companies need to start paying close attention to is how close their brand is to their community. For example, how many comments do you receive on your social presence each day, and how many are replied to? What is the kind of feedback you’re seeing? While reporting social media success to management in conventional ROI terms is important, speaking of growing brand engagement is equally important to assess social media’s true added value.