Measuring Social Media ROI with Metrics

In the most part, there is little use spending time on social media, unless you can measure the return you are getting for your investment – whether it is time, money, effort etc. The hit and hope philosophy is just not good enough and fortunately, there is no need to swing and miss as there are a number of great tools out there for measuring metrics in social media and getting an idea of your ROI.

Metrics are performance indicators and allow you to see a number of important factors, such as impressions, leads and revenue to name a few – so, let’s look at the best metrics for social media.



API

This metric allows you to see the reach of your social media attempts and allows you to classify it into organic, paid and viral results. It’s also a great way to see relative results as the outcomes can be compared on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. It may not show how many people read the tweet or Facebook status but it does give you a good idea of how successful they are. It also shows retweets.

Buzz

This Facebook metric is a great way to see how much of a ‘buzz’ you are creating and allows you to see if your posts are being discussed. It’s also possible to set up your Google Alerts to see if people are talking about your posts or tweets – this is a good way to see if you are having a mark on your specific industry.

Social media listening tools such as Viralheat and others also can add to your tracking and allow you an insight into who is mentioning you online and the context they are talking about you in. This can be very useful when hoping to track sentiment, or even for CRM purposes.

Social Referrals

Facebook has recently added a tool to allow you to see how much of your home site traffic is coming via your Facebook page. This conversion measurement tool allows you to track the impact of adverts on your brand and even the number of people who became fans and the made an onsite conversion because of adverts –something we believe is increasingly important at Pinpoint Designs.

Of course, there are other tools that can measure all your social media conversion attempts and show the conversion rates you are garnering from social media sites.

More Basic

There are also a number of basic metrics that you will need when tracking your social media ROI.

· Social page views – the number of people who visited your page

· Engagement Rates – the number of people who interacted through Liking, posting, re-tweeting or commenting etc.

· Retweet Rates – How many people retweet your posts

· Visitor to Lead Rate – How many visitors are becoming leads

Finally, when you have all this information you should look to see which site is driving you more traffic, conversions and essentially money. Some social media is more useful to some businesses than others and understanding this allows you to focus on the one that works for you.

Author bio: Lewis Sellers is the Founder of Pinpoint Designs, a Yorkshire based digital agency located in Harrogate, North Yorkshire