Tips to Measure Your Brand’s Social Media ROI

The Social Media has become every online entrepreneur’s indispensable tool. But it is not very easy to find out if all the time you spent promoting your products and engaging with your customers on Facebook or Foursquare has been reaping rewards, and this can frustrate you a little.

ROI or Return On Investment is more than just about the money you spend and the money you earn. It is also the value you obtain from social media based on your campaign objectives.

Therefore you first need to determine what the intents of your campaign are:

• If the purpose is sales, then the ROI will be the sales directly coming in because of your campaign.
• If your goal is to get consumer insights, then your ROI will be both the quantity and quality of insights you receive.
• Perhaps your goal is brand awareness.

Tips to Measure Your Brand’s Social Media ROI

People join social networking sites to be able to catch up with friends and exchange personal news and interesting info. Think of these sites like online clubs, where people meet after the day’s work to unwind.

People join brand communities on these sites to know more about the products and are likely to display brand loyalty. They are also more likely to recommend the brand to their friends and family. Naturally, when they do that, they also add their faith in that product. This helps in brand building.

Strangers in a community usually introduce themselves to each other and discuss the product. You can also interact with your consumers by responding to their queries and comments. Whenever you receive a compliment for your product or one customer recommends it to another, your brand value goes up. If someone trashes it, there is negative value.

So how will you calculate at the end of the day, how successful or otherwise your social media campaign has been? Here are several methods; some can be used singly, some in combination. Remember that choosing the right method of measurement depends on the type of products and services your business offers, the kind of media you use and the type of customers you have.

• Keep track of every share, like, video download, blog visit, and comment. It is now easy to assess soundly how many of your followers actually view what you post with the help of tools presented by social media researchers like Dan Zarrella.

• Look at the online interactions of your customers; you will get an idea of how close their relationship is. This helps you assess how many people pass on the brand trust to their close friends. Why is this important? The closer the sender and receiver of the brand info, the more the impact on the brand.

• You can of course use tools like Google Analytics and keep track of how many referrals to your site came from social networking sites. Also keep track of how many of those visitors who were referred, actually purchased from your site.

• Check for any specific instance where the social media was directly influential in generating sales revenue.

• Check for correlation between likes or shares and the revenue created.

• Keep track of the number of consumer grievances that were resolved and rates of customer satisfaction.

• Check how many followers clicked on the bit.ly link in your tweet, and how many people actually clicked on the blog hotlink.

• Use FB analytics to get an estimate of how many non-fans read your post.

Of course, none of these may give you an exact number, but you will most certainly be able to see whether your campaign is effective or not.

Must Read: Importance of Social Media Monitoring

Now i hope you can easily measure your brand’s Social Media ROI. If you find this article interesting share with your friends. Remember to subscribe to my RSS feeds. Let me hear what you think about this topic, use the comment form below to share your views and opinions about measuring social media ROI.