How To Prove Roi For Social Media
So you’ve spent ages building up your social media portfolio, crafting your Twitter and Facebook pages to perfection, attracting lots of subscribers to YouTube and connections on LinkedIn. You’re getting lots of positive comments and feedback, everything seems good… then someone asks you to prove ROI for social on all your efforts and it’s hard to give them a response.
How are all your social media activities positively benefiting your company? How do you measure the impact? How can you provide stats for engagement? Don’t panic – there are ways and means of providing metrics and demonstrating just how beneficial your social media pages are to your business.
MAKE A PLAN FOR SOCIAL MEDIA
First, you need to effectively plan out your social media marketing. What do you hope to achieve? Who do you plan to attract? And don’t just aim for something vague like ‘increase number of Facebook likes’ – try to attract a certain audience, for instance, a group of people not currently engaged with your company. By having these aims set out at the start, it’s a lot easier to measure your campaign’s success and to be able to prove ROI for social.
THE FORM BOOK
Plenty of big brands on Facebook, from car manufacturers to cheese merchants, engage their fans with offers that involve filling in a form to receive the offer – providing you with lots of lovely data on ages, genders, addresses and so on.
Plenty of data means plenty of proof of ROI. This is much easier on Facebook, but an offsite landing page can be set up for Twitter to achieve the same purpose. Then you can follow up this data by emailing exclusive offers to your fans – and any responses you get is further proof of ROI.
Marvellous. Of course, this is assuming that your social strategy is getting it right in the first case.
Then, of course, you might want to follow all this up with a sales call, and any successes you get from those – well, once again, those seeking proof of ROI will be very happy.
GET INSIGHT
Of course, while it seems obvious, data on how many clickthroughs, retweets and so on are still valid forms of proof of ROI. So make good use of Facebook Insights to see which of your posts are most popular, where people who like your posts are from and their ages and genders, and so on. Although Twitter doesn’t have these analytic options built in, websites such as Twitonomy can offer an almost baffling array of data, from clicks’ countries of origin to the number of clicks from any date range you fancy , allowing you to compare the success of one Twitter campaign to another. Very handy.
You should also employ Google Analytics as well, where you can track where your links are posted and how much traffic has been driven from them. It’s an essential tool for serious analysis, especially when it comes to blogs, and the data you can get is hugely important from an ROI perspective.
ALL IN THE PRESENTATION
So you’ve got all this data. But you still need to present it properly to truly prove your ROI. Take the info and demonstrate such things as:
- How your audience has changed over time
- How your data compares to your competitors
- Traffic generated to the company website from social media and converted to sales
- How your social media campaigns have fared compared to traditional print/TV/radio campaigns
Boil all this data down and present it in such a way as to make no room for doubt as to the success of your campaigns and how much they represent proof of ROI.
THE PROOF IS IN THE REPORTING
A report from the Internet Advertising Bureau UK has suggested that social media can generate potential ROI of over 3:1, and that four out of five customers are more likely to make a purchase following exposure to a brand’s social media presence. This being the case, your social media should be capable of generating similar results – so use your data to prove it. Best of luck.
Continue reading here: 4 Social Media Tips & Templates to Save You Time
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