Social Media marketing has proven itself to be a valued digital channel that deserves a seat at the business strategy table. Rightfully so, social has the marketing power to increase your brand’s awareness, create brand loyalty, build market authority, and create conversion opportunities for your business. Still, if Spiderman has taught us anything, it’s that with great power comes great responsibility.

Measuring and tracking social media return on investment allows marketers to actively learn what’s successful, what isn’t successful, and how to improve the tactics that aren’t delivering value. Tracking social ROI also allows the business to see how much the social space is changing and how your business strategy needs to change in order to successfully expand.

But how are you measuring your social success?

Too many companies are measuring their social media marketing success by only counting “likes” and “followers”. As great as it is to look at your social growth on each platform, those metrics alone are not nearly enough to determine the success of your social campaign.

Define and Align Your Social Goals with Your Campaign Goals

It is critical that you know your objectives in order to measure the effectiveness of your social campaigns. Before you can accurately measure your ROI, you need to know what metrics you are going to track and measure. The key is to set social media goals that align with existing business goals. Ask yourself;

• What are you trying to accomplish or gain with this campaign? Is your goal to attain a specific number of leads this quarter? Is your goal to increase a specific percentage of traffic from your social channel to your website? If so, you want to set specific numbers in place and ensure that you are tracking these figures throughout the duration of the campaign.
• Which social platforms align with your goals? For example, if you are a wedding photographer and you’re trying to reach an audience of potential brides, you might want to consider a platform like Pinterest where your business benefits from the usages of photos, themed ideas, and a high percentage of female users.

Social media can serve a variety of purposes, so you should be able to generate a list of what you are trying to achieve from your social efforts. Your list should also include all of your business goals for social media. Are you trying to spread awareness? Are you trying to get to know your customers better or showcase your products?

After you have established goals, audit your current social media performance to establish reference objectives and set realistic targets for improvement.

Choose the Best Analytic Tool

After you’ve defined the goals you want to measure, you need to find the tools that can actually help you capture and track these metrics. Depending on the social channels your campaign is active on, there will be some form of reporting you can use with administrative access to the page. However, using a third-party tool may make it easier to access cross-channel information in one place. Choose carefully.

There are a lot of analytic tools out that claim to be able to monitor, track and analyze data pulled from social channels. Social analytic tools like Buffer, Cyfe, Hootsuite, and Klout are popular, but are they the best tools for reporting your campaign metrics? To use analytics effectively, the data needs to be presented in easy-to-understand formats. Always take the following into consideration.

• What are your goals? Determine the type of information you want access to based on the performance capabilities of the tool. Do you need to filter keywords? Do you need to integrate your CRM system? Do you need a tool that allows website analytics integrations?
• What is your budget? Analytic tools for content performance and channel growth are fairly easy to access since reporting can be done on the backend of social platforms. However, if you are running a large scaled campaign or have multiple profiles on various channels, you will need a much richer tool to show value.
• How active is the campaign? If your campaign is being supported on multiple channels you need to decide if your tool can pull data from each platform. In addition, the tool needs to pull data to support the metrics you want to track.

If you want to improve your social strategy you need to determine its value to your marketing efforts. In order to determine its value, you need to measure it. The important thing is to progressively work to improve your social media success and achieve results you can value. Setting up your next social campaign is as easy as contacting us at 770-817-9560 for a consultation.

By: Courtneika Hudson