Most businesses today use social media as a way to promote their services in order to reach a wider audience. But how can you measure your ROI from social media websites? What is the investment translation of your “Likes,” followers and fans?
Instead of learning how to accurately calculate your social media ROI, a better alternative is how you approach your social media ROI. Here are a few ways to do this.
Define Your Goals
The most important thing to do when it comes to social media marketing is to define your goals and what you want to achieve. You can set a variety of goals like the number of comments you receive per post, the number of followers you have on Facebook or Twitter and whether or not your followers are visiting your site. All of this data can be used to help you measure the ROI from your social media campaign.
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Track Your Data
You can roughly measure social media ROI by tracking data. Google Analytics can track incoming links to your site and the activities of your visitors, and applications like PostRank, Omniture and Hootsuite can track Facebook and Twitter metrics. Tracking such data makes it easier to see if your goals were met and if traffic to your site increased after you posted a promotion on Facebook, for example.
Read Between the Comments
It’s important to analyze your social media comments not only to calculate your ROI, but to determine what your followers are interested in. Compare interaction levels on each post, i.e. high comments left on online poker posts vs. low comments on blackjack tips. This data can help you tweak the content of your social media pages, as well site content to increase traffic and conversions.
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Social Media is the Vehicle, Not the Destination
Affiliate marketers sometimes forget that social media marketing is a communications tool and that consistent action over time will produce a successful ROI. This is not really a new concept, as other forms of marketing, such as email marketing, also runs by these rules; i.e. most marketers don’t ask about the ROI of a single email newsletter, but rather the ROI for the whole email campaign.
Social media marketing ROI should be measured on how successful you are engaging in social media activities over time. If such activities are increasing your site traffic and conversion rates, you’re on the right track.
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How do you measure the ROI of your social media efforts? Do you use any tracking programs listed above? Tell us in the comments below.