Measuring Social Media ROI
Photo by Shannon Mashek
Social media marketing is a great way to connect with customers, but understanding how to measure the ROI of social media efforts is a blurry concept to most. With rapid changes in technology and the shift to a user-centered focus, campaigns can no longer rely on a “one size fits most” approach. However, social media makes it easy to test and reinvent live campaigns as new insights are gained. Knowing who you want to target and learning how to best utilize the tools available to you will position you to maximize the return on your social media investment.
1. Define the audience
Every marketing campaign should begin with a target audience. Social media campaigns can target very specific demographic information, such as age, race, geographic location, hobbies and even other digital activity. To use this targeting efficiently, it’s important for businesses to know the demographics of the groups they hope to reach. Marketingland.com, an online publication covering the digital marketing industry, offers tips for defining your target audience.
2. Find out where they are
Once the target audience is defined, you can focus on the social media sites on which that group is already active. Organizations like Pew Research report social media data annually, tracking fluctuations in dominant age groups, ethnicities and income levels across various social sites. Some social sites also have their own trackers, such as the Facebook Audience Insights tool. Adequate research on current social media demographics as well as foresight of future shifts is important when planning ongoing marketing strategies.
3. Set goals
Do you want to increase conversions? Looking for new sales leads? Want more newsletter sign-ups or contest entries? Having a social media presence can be beneficial in a lot of ways, but you have to know how you’re going to measure success in order to determine if your efforts have been successful. Figure out what success will look like to you so you can create a strategy to achieve your specific goals and define the criteria by which you'll measure success.
4. Create a strategy
You know who you want to reach, where you’re going to reach them, and what you want to get out of it. Now you have to figure out how. This is going to differ from site to site. Users interact with content differently on Facebook than Twitter. A tweet has to be more concise than an Instagram post. Shelf life—or half-life—also differs. On Facebook, the longer you wait between posts, the more it affects the organic reach of future posts, which affects post engagement. But posting too many times in a short period can annoy your followers and cause them to ‘unlike’ the page. Knowing the laws of the land for each site is essential to crafting a successful campaign.
5. Implement and track progress
Once your campaign has gone live, make sure to track its progress in real-time. Social sites offer their own tools to analyze engagement within campaigns, but you may also want to integrate Google Analytics, especially if your intention is to lead users to an external landing page or encourage them to make a purchase. It’s important to learn how and when people are engaging with your posts so you can make necessary adjustments along the way. Two of the biggest benefits of social media marketing are instantaneous data and the ability to make adjustments to live campaigns.
6. Redefine as you go
You’ll need to refine your strategy during live campaigns due to new information about your audience and changes to any algorithms used by the site. Facebook, for example, routinely updates its algorithm based on user feedback. Their latest update impacted organic reach for business pages as Facebook shifts the focus of users' news feeds. Knowing how the site's technology is interacting with your posts will help you learn how to get the most engagement with your content. You'll also learn your audience's content consumption habits, such as what time they're most active and on what devices. This information can be used to alter how often you post and how you craft your message.