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How to Improve Your Social Media Calls to Action
Measuring Social Media: How to Determine Your ROI
Are you trying to measure your social media return on investment (ROI)?
Do you need to measure the social performance of your business?
To learn how to determine the ROI for social media marketing, I interview Nichole Kelly for this episode of the Social Media Marketing podcast.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is a show from Social Media Examiner.
It’s designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.
The show format is on-demand talk radio (also known as podcasting).
In this episode, I interview Nichole Kelly, author of How to Measure Social Media and the CEO of Social Media Explorer and SME Digital.
Nichole shares why so many businesses struggle to determine the ROI of their social media activities and what’s really important in your social media measurement.
You’ll learn the most important steps that all marketers should take when thinking about social ROI.
Share your feedback, read the show notes and get the links mentioned in this episode below!
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Here are some of the things you’ll discover in this show:
Social Media Return on Investment (ROI)
Why so many marketers struggle with measuring social ROI
Nichole believes one of the reasons social ROI is a challenge is because marketers have redefined the metrics used to measure social media. Words such as mentions and retweets are similar to what was measured before. But now people have decided that social media is special, and therefore needs to be measured in a special way.
Marketers have redefined metrics to try to measure social media. Image source: iStockphoto
Nichole believes this has set us up for failure. When you try to 1) justify what you are doing and 2) measure the return, you can’t compare these two things. It then becomes difficult to compare and optimize whatever the return is.
People have played with the return on investment phrase in the social realm. For example, you’ve likely heard of return on influence, return on engagement and return on conversation. The problem with this approach is that at the end of the day, ROI is a financial return. And whether it is the best measure for success of social media doesn’t really matter, because it’s the measure of success for business.
Listen to the show to find out why you need to translate social media into a positive ROI.
The backstory that led Nichole to social media ROI
Nichole explains how she spent most of her career in corporate marketing and grew up in the boardroom.
In June 2011, there was a study that came out from the Fournaise Report that said 73% of CEOs think marketers lack business credibility. The #1 stated reason was because we talk about trends like social media.
In June 2011, the Fournaise Report said 73% of CEOs think marketers lack business credibility.
Whether you agree with this or not, Nichole noticed that marketers were caught in a trap of trying to measure social media differently. And measuring social media ROI isn’t as hard as everyone was making it out to be.
So she set out to provide how-to information with step-by-step instructions on translating social media into something that can be compared across channels.
Nichole wrote ROI-related articles for Social Media Examiner and discovered there was a never-ending appetite for help figuring out social media ROI.
Nichole thinks people are still trying to understand it completely, but they are actually ready to measure now.
When Nichole first started, a lot of people were talking about measurement in philosophical terms. We are starting to see companies, and marketers in particular, understand that with social media, it doesn’t matter how many fans or followers they have.
At the end of the day, if you can compare social media to what you spend on pay-per-click advertising and start measuring it with something simple like cost per click on all of the web traffic you are sending to your site, you have something that justifies a budget.
Listen to the show to find out why Nichole feels measuring social media ROI hasn’t come full circle yet.
The most important first step for marketers when thinking about social ROI
The first step is never use a social media metric. You should never talk in terms of fans, followers, likes and retweets. You should dispose of all of this social media lingo and start thinking in terms of other marketing channels and what you measure there.
For example, if you focus on pay-per-click advertising, you should measure cost per impression, cost per click and sometimes cost per conversion. If you focus on public relations, you should measure cost per impression and sometimes cost per mention. The one thing that you can measure right now is how much you spend on content, agency fees and total spend on social media marketing.
If you start comparing all of that with the cost of whatever is brought to your website or whatever the conversions are from social media, then it’s easy for people to understand social media ROI. You want to use the terminology that executives are familiar with.
Listen to the show to learn why it’s important to use the terminology that executives are familiar with.
The main types of objectives marketers measure
Nichole sees many companies measuring reach and engagement. As marketers, we want to optimize what we are doing and the only way to do that is to measure how often people engage and whether a piece of content is performing. These are good metrics.
For business it comes down to three things: sales volume, revenue and cost.
Nichole feels that we haven’t quite connected social media with the bottom of the funnel where the actual conversion, sale or customer retention process happen. And because we haven’t connected these things, we have executives with misaligned expectations about where social media fits into the sales funnel.
Nichole feels social media hasn't quite connected with the bottom of the funnel. Image source: iStockphoto
Although you may be generating interest in the social channels, likely you still are converting customers using email marketing, having them come through organically or by using pay-per-click advertising. You need to align expectations accordingly, or you could set yourself up for failure. This can kill your ability to get any kind of budget for the social media marketing your company needs.
There are two different types of leads. A soft lead is someone who’s exchanged his/her email address in return for something, and a hard lead is someone who is already a customer or a qualified prospect.
Nichole recommends you generate the soft leads with social media and then use email marketing to convert them into hard leads.
The biggest call to action that Nichole sees is “Sign up for our newsletter.” She finds this funny. How many people really sign up for a newsletter anymore? Today the word newsletter is almost the clean word for spam. People really don’t want a newsletter. They want something of value.
Delivering a newsletter is not the best call to action to get that email address so that you can do additional marketing.
Nichole likes to focus on content-based marketing, where you give people something they value in return for their email address, and tell them what kind of emails they can expect after that.
Are you trying to gain leads with your social media efforts? Then you need to measure the cost per lead. Most companies that spend money on marketing are measuring what the cost per lead is today. The second piece to measure is cost per acquisition. How much did you spend to get an actual customer? You can measure these two metrics across channels.
One of the biggest challenges with social media is that we are trying to measure social media in the social channel, when in fact the business value tends to happen on the website or through the email list. You have to stop thinking in terms of one silo and look at social media as one part of the story.
Listen to the show to find out how to measure every touch along the buying cycle.
How marketers can measure performance
Most companies have a variety of different website analytic tools; however, the majority use Google Analytics. Nichole explains how you first need to have a goal set up for your conversion page with a thank-you page. So you set up the goal on the thank-you page. Then with every link that you share, you add “custom URL parameters.”
There are three parameters you can append to the end of a URL to tell Google Analytics the campaign, the medium and the source of where that link was posted. Nichole uses these parameters and keeps track of them in a database. This tells her exactly which status update generates a specific conversion because she has numbered each status update and has it in a database.
Listen to the show to hear how to track your conversions.
How marketers should convey their data to management
Nichole describes two different types of metrics. First of all, there are the metrics that marketing managers care about. These are the metrics you need to optimize your results. For example, which tweet led to the most conversions that month and should we do more tweets like that?
Once you start getting into executive management, you have to distill it down to three things. These are cost per impression, cost per engagement and cost per lead. Sometimes you need to add in cost per customer acquisition. If you can get to revenue and there’s an integration with CRM, you start adding things like average revenue per customer and revenue metrics, etc.
The big three are the ones that have historical presence in companies. They are benchmarks for success and a known acceptable cost for each one of these things. This is all the executive team cares about.
Social media is one line item on a budget of many marketing channels. Executive management really doesn’t pay attention to the nitty-gritty. And Nichole believes that if the executive team pays too much attention to these small details, it probably means that the marketer has not positioned social media to show proper integration. This is why they are scrutinizing it so much.
Nichole always works on getting this information into that one line item on the overall marketing report. People are scared to measure and marketers are scared to be held accountable. If you start delivering these kinds of metrics and your data shows that social media is not working, then your job is on the line. And the pressure isn’t just about social media, it’s coming for the entire marketing channel.
People are scared to measure and marketers are scared to be held accountable. Image source: iStockphoto
It’s now time for marketers to get serious. Is it going to be something you integrate into your marketing plans and into your business, internally and externally, or is it something you are going to fiddle around with on the side?
Should companies measure engagement in answering questions on their Facebook wall as a public service? Should they measure engagement with “thank-you’s” on Twitter? Nichole believes that it isn’t that these activities don’t lead to ROI. The intent is different.
There’s the question of being a good steward in social media and then there’s also the question of finding a way to impact business. It’s a combination of both of these things that work on social media.
You’ll discover what happened when Nichole did a test for her book on Facebook. When she first posted a status update simply with a link to her book, there was no engagement at all. Then she took a picture of herself in Barnes and Noble with the book, and she received tons of feedback. People loved it. Nichole hasn’t got the numbers yet to see if this generated sales. But it was the one thing that people could connect with because it made Nichole human.
Nichole explains how measuring ROI is important, and why you should also continue to be human and provide value, while tracking your sales funnel.
Listen to the show to hear why Nichole is 100% sure that your ROI is negative when you start to measure.
Economical tools Nichole recommends
The one tool most people have is Google Analytics. Nichole’s advice is look at the goal conversions that are set up on your site.
Next is to do a search for Google Analytics URL Builder, which allows you to put in the three parameters mentioned earlier. This generates a long URL that has them all appended. You can shorten it in your social channels.
Google Analytics URL Builder.
Once you have tested it, you can now connect this to sales data. This means plugging into a marketing automation system that attaches to a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool like Marketo or Pardot.
Listen to the show to hear how the Google custom URL Builder works for social channels.
This Week’s Social Question
Ben Adam Smith from House Planning Help asks, “How long should you spend managing your social media?”
Ben Adam Smith of House Planning Help sent in today's social media question.
Ben, here is what you need to do.
Here’s a statistic from our 2012 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, where we surveyed about 3,800 marketers and asked them how much time they spend on social media. About 64% are spending between 1 to 10 hours a week on social media.
If you look at 10 hours spread over a 5-day workweek, that’s a maximum of about 2 hours a day. This shows that people are investing a fair amount of time in their social media efforts.
To help you figure out how you can spend less time and still get great results, here’s a very simple plan.
You can use scheduling tools like HootSuite and Buffer to schedule some of your activities (but not all of them).
At Social Media Examiner, we use SocialOomph to schedule our tweets and our LinkedIn updates only. The reason for this, to the best of our knowledge, is Twitter and LinkedIn are the two networks that don’t penalize you for using their tools. But we’ve heard mixed reports over time as to whether Facebook penalizes you or not.
With regards to Facebook, we have found the best thing to do is to manually update your news feed.
On Twitter, I suggest you write down a number of interesting things that you can schedule into one of these tools. Find some interesting content that’s been written about your industry by others. Add a few tweets with links to your own content. Consider adding an occasional tweet about an activity or an event you’re going to be participating in or attending. Then spend an hour and schedule these tweets throughout an entire week.
If you also want to schedule updates on Facebook, there’s a built-in scheduler for Facebook Pages. So you can actually go into Facebook and schedule your updates using the Facebook built-in scheduler at the same time. The only downside to this is that I’ve had mixed reports on results. To learn more, visit here and do a search for Facebook Schedule or Scheduling.
The next step is to track what is working. You’ll learn in today’s podcast how to do this. When you begin to see that some things are working better than others, consider scaling back on what’s not working, or experiment. And increase your activity on what is working.
Listen to the show to gain more insights into how we do this at Social Media Examiner.
Call in and leave your social media–related questions for us and we may include them in a future show.
Other Show Mentions
In just a few short days, we are kicking off Content Success Summit 2013—an online conference designed for marketers and business owners who want to expand their platforms.
This conference will reveal everything from strategy to content creation techniques you can put to use immediately.
Content Success Summit starts February 5, 2013, and is spread over four weeks to improve learning and accommodate your schedule. Plus you’ll get recordings and transcripts of all live sessions. Be sure to check it out.
We have 22 speakers including Joe Pulizzi, Ann Handley, Michael Hyatt, Michael Stelzner, Mark Schaefer, Amy Porterfield, Gini Dietrich, Marcus Sheridan, DJ Waldow, David Siteman Garland, Pat Flynn and Derek Halpern.
Social Media Marketing World is Social Media Examiner’s latest mega-conference—taking place at the waterfront San Diego Marriott Marquis & Marina in San Diego, California on April 7-9, 2013.
As you’d expect, Social Media Examiner recruited the biggest and best names in the world of social media marketing for this conference. Only the best for you! Be sure to check it out.
If you have been thinking about attending but you need to convince the boss, you’ll be happy to know we have a section called Convincing the Boss.
Key takeaways mentioned in this episode:
- Connect with Nichole on Twitter
- Check out Nichole’s book How to Measure Social Media
- Take a look at the Fournaise Report, which said 73% of CEOs think marketers lack business credibility
- Discover more about pay per click, cost per impression, cost per conversion, cost per engagement and cost per lead
- Check out Google Analytics
- Try Google Analytics URL Builder
- Try Google Adwords, Google’s advertising network
- Check out CRM services Marketo and Pardot
- Discover more about House Planning Help
- Check out Social Media Examiner’s 2012 Social Media Marketing Industry Report
- Try these scheduling tools: HootSuite, Buffer and SocialOomph
- Read more about Facebook’s built-in scheduler
- Learn more about Content Success Summit 2013 and Social Media Marketing World
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What do you think? What are your thoughts on measuring social media ROI? Please leave your comments below.
Images from iStockPhoto.
How to Set Your Social Media Strategy and Measure It
In this video I interview Dave Fleet, vice president of Digital at Edelman in Toronto.
Dave shares how social media measurement impacts businesses today. You’ll learn what strategies businesses are using to measure their social media marketing efforts.
Be sure to check out the takeaways below after you watch the video.
Here are some of the things you’ll learn in this video:
- Discover some of the mistakes that businesses are making when it comes to social media.
- Why as a company you need to step back and look at things from a more strategic perspective.
- What’s a good strategy to put in place for your corporation.
- How to set up social media to make it scalable.
- Why you should think about the infrastructure you need to support social business.
- Why measurement is about more than just results.
- Why success should never be based on views or follower numbers.
- Learn what trends corporations should be paying attention to.
- Why content is an emerging trend.
Connect with Dave on Twitter @davefleet and check out Dave’s blog and Edelman.
What do you think? Do you have a social media strategy in place? What tips do you have to share about your experience with measurement? Please leave them below.
Social media metrics with Jim Sterne, Chairman, Web Analytics Association at SES London 2010
Byron Gordon, SEO-PR, interviews the godfather of online marketing, Jim Sterne, Chairman of the Web Analytics Association and founder of eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit. Jim Sterne begins by describing marketing as the use of sheep and chickens. In the beginning, says Sterne, and for thousands of years, marketing and sales was two people bartering. That is how marketing was done and a price was reached. 150 years ago, the price tag was invented changing the dynamic between buyer and seller and giving the seller the opportunity to mass promote their product but ignore the actual needs and wants of their customers. Sterne says the Internet has brought back one to one marketing and the rise of social media now makes it necessary for companies to implement more than ever. Jim then gives goes on to give an example of social media measurement by citing Kentucky Fried Chickens use of their logo to measure their public awareness of their brand. Jim then goes on to discuss his upcoming book, Social Media Metrics, about classic advertising tools for awareness, reach, frequency, and to measure sentiment, influence, including the most influential topics relating to brand, and what are the business results and value of engagements using social media. To learn more about Jim Sterne, you can visit www.jimsterne.com. To learn more about speaking and attending a Search Engine Strategies conference, please visit www.searchenginestrategies.com
The latest from: Online Social Marketing Tips
How to Use the New Google Analytics Social Reporting Tool
The new social media reporting tools from Google Analytics provides marketers free social media monitoring and measurement capabilities.
The new reporting features provide the most value when coupled with Google+.
This way, community managers gain insight around off-page activity as Google Analytics and Google+ are happily integrated.
Tracking off-site social activity is just one of the cool new features that community managers will be swooning over.
Check out the other actionable reports outlined below and discover how businesses can best leverage them to determine the value of social media.
This article will cover how to use the new social reporting features inside Google Analytics to help evaluate and measure your social media campaigns.
#1: Social Visitors Flow
The newly added Social Visitors Flow is a visual presentation of how visitors from social properties are navigating your website. Assuming the goal of your social media campaign is to get more traffic to your website, this report quickly gives you insight into which social platforms are sending the most traffic to your site and what your social visitors are doing once they get there.
Google Analytics Social Visitors Flow report displays top social referrers and tracks users' journey through your website.
The chart outlines the top social referrers, the top landing pages and also the page drop-off rate. By comparing the drop-off rate of social traffic to other traffic sources, you can determine which traffic referrers are sending the most qualified visitors to your website.
By hovering over each specific social channel, you can determine the percentage of traffic that dropped off the site and the percentage that actually stuck around and navigated to additional pages.
After spending a few minutes comparing this metric across the website’s traffic channels, it’s clear that visitors from LinkedIn and Facebook are spending more time on the website than visitors from a very expensive paid advertising campaign on Google AdWords.
“Having a comparison of the user drop-off rates across all channels is helpful in gaining a deeper understanding of what is working and what is not,” says Melissa Barker, author of Social Media Marketing: A Strategic Approach. “Knowing the number of visits each channel sent alone is not enough to gauge the true success of your messaging.”
The new Google Analytics social reporting features allow you to compare drop off rates
The Social Visitors Flow report also outlines a user’s second, third, fourth and fifth interaction. By studying these interactions, you can quickly determine what visitors are looking for on your site and if they’re headed down your conversion funnel.
The Social Visitors Flow report goes beyond the user's first interaction with your website—it also displays subsequent interactions. This allows you to gain insight into the most common user pathways, your most popular content and where visitors are dropping off or losing interest.
#2: Off-Site Activity—Social Data Hub
Google has partnered with several social networks to provide Google Analytics users with off-site activity data including +1s and comments. The full list of Social Data Hub partners can be found in the Google Developers forum, notable partners being Blogger, Disqus, Meetup, Google+, Digg, Delicious, Reddit and many more.
By navigating to your website’s Social Sources in Google Analytics and then drilling down to the specific platforms supported by the Social Data Hub, you can gain insight into which specific pieces of content are driving the most social engagement.
Previously, this type of off-site data had been technically difficult and expensive to capture, requiring bulky third-party tools.
Off-site activities such as comments, +1s and reshares are displayed alongside the content that drove the off-site action. You can quickly determine which pieces of content are resonating with your online community.
Google+ activity is fully integrated with Google Analytics and the off-site data for the platform is impressive. Businesses can discover the total number of +1s, comments, posts and shares on Google+, along with a breakdown of these metrics by individual post.
Google's Social Reporting now captures off-site activity such as +1s, votes, comments and reshares.
#3: Activity Stream
The Google Analytics Social Reports Activity Stream is REALLY cool! Granted, it would be way cooler if Facebook and Twitter were included in it, because then it would truly be an integrated reporting and monitoring platform for the most popular social channels.
This feature allows you to monitor some of the less obvious channels such as Digg, Read It Later, Echo, Delicious, etc. With the click of a button, you can see who has interacted with your content.
This feature is segmented by Conversations and Events. Conversations include content reshares, comments and new posts by anyone on the specific social network. Events include +1s, bookmarks, votes, saves, etc.
The Activity Stream allows you to view individual post/page analytics, the content on Google Ripples, the actual content and the social activity. With one click, you can jump to the interaction and respond, follow the user and monitor conversations about your content.
According to the Google Analytics team, the Activity Stream is REAL-TIME to the minute, so you’ll see the most recent interactions and have the ability to respond immediately. This has been a long-standing issue with other monitoring platforms—they don’t have the capability to give this type of insight in real time, when it’s most relevant.
Google Analytics Activity Stream features off-site conversations about your brand.
#4: Social Value At-a-Glance
Google’s Social Overview report features a simple chart outlining what they call Social Value. In order to get the most out of this report, you’ll need to set up “conversions” or GOALS within your Google Analytics account.
With only a few clicks, you can quickly start tracking how social traffic helps drive website conversions or events. This can include obvious conversions such as an online purchase or lead form completion, but it can also include micro-conversions such as video views or blog visits. Google allows you to define goals based upon a few factors:
- URL destination—For example, a user landing on a shopping cart or contact form thank-you page
- Visit duration—Based upon a specific amount of time spent on the website
- Pages visited—Based upon the number of pages visited on the site
- Event—Based upon user actions such as video views, white paper downloads or click-throughs
If you have defined a monetary value for your website conversion, you can enter that data when setting up the goal in Google Analytics. You are now armed with an actual dollar amount or Social Value for your social media channels.
The Social Value of your campaigns can now be seen at a glance by setting up goals and conversions in Google Analytics.
#5: Assisted vs. Last Interaction Analysis and the Multi-Channel Funnel Report
For years now, analysts have been discussing the limits of “last-click attribution” and the need for a more robust model to accurately measure online user behavior. If you are measuring your social media campaign effectiveness based upon the last-click model, you’re likely underestimating the true impact of your campaigns.
Google Analytics has now made it easier than ever to detect which social channels have assisted with conversions by adding this option as a tab under the Social Conversions report. Google defines an assisted conversion as:
The number (and monetary value) of sales and conversions the social network assisted. An assist occurs when someone visits your site, leaves without converting, but returns later to convert during a subsequent visit. The higher these numbers, the more important the assist role of the social network.
As long as a user completes the conversion within 30 days, Google Analytics can track that conversion path from the first click to the final click and everywhere in between. They have presented this data visually in the Multi-Channel Funnel report. Simply navigate to Conversions and then click on Multi-Channel Funnels.
With one click, you can determine which channels are assisting with the most conversions and determine the top conversion paths.
Google's Multi-Channel Funnel report quickly identifies conversion pathways and attributes your social networks with assisted conversions.
Google Analytics offers up to eight basic channel groupings, including one for all social channels as the default. But with only a few clicks, it’s possible to customize these groupings to get even more detailed reporting.
Google Analytics offers these eight basic channel groupings by default.
For example, I can create separate groupings for Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, thereby quickly determining which social campaign was assisting with the most conversions and driving the highest ROI.
The Multi-Channel Funnel report allows channel customization and segmentation, allowing businesses to further segment social traffic by each contributing network.
These are just a sample of the actionable insights that can be gained from Google Analytics’ new Social Reports.
The social reporting features combined with the power of Google Analytics and Google+ provide what social media marketers have been dreaming about—a seamless way to track the value of social media from the off-site social network activity to that final click on your website’s Buy Now button.
What do you think? How are you using Google Analytics to help determine the value of your social media campaigns? Be sure to comment with your best reporting and measurement tips.
5 Reasons You Should Measure Social Media Return on Investment
Are you wondering if measuring social media return on investment (ROI) is important?
Do you cringe when you think about putting together another report?
You aren’t alone. But times are changing for social media and these reasons will show you why it’s time to get serious about measuring your results.
Do I Really Need to Measure ROI?
Let’s start by addressing the elephant in the room. Is ROI the right measure of success for social media?
There are many who would argue that a financial return doesn’t show the true value of social media for the organization. I would agree that ROI doesn’t paint the full picture.
However, the bottom line is that executives and business owners sleep, eat, and breathe ROI. It has been the measure of success since the beginning of their careers and while we can jump up and down and tell them it isn’t a complete picture, they aren’t going to believe it until they see it.
Therefore, it’s time to get serious about ROI, but that doesn’t mean that you should sacrifice other types of metrics that help to round out the story. You need both and this is why.
Get serious and measure social media results. Image source: iStockPhoto.
#1: ROI is a Necessary Evil
Regardless of whether ROI paints the pretty picture that we want for social media’s value to the organization, it is the universal measure of success for business.
We’ve seen new metrics like Return on Influence and Return on Engagement being talked about. Some marketers like these metrics because they feel they do a better job of telling the story of social media’s value.
I understand the need to have a holistic view on where social delivers; however, we can’t redefine ROI because it doesn’t suit our needs or it doesn’t paint the picture we want. If you don’t start to measure the real return on your efforts, someone is going to do it for you.
And if they do the measurement, you won’t have the opportunity to clarify what ROI isn’t showing and present metrics that help to round out the perspective. You’ll look like the person who was trying to hide a negative ROI to save your project. And yes, when you measure it the first time it will likely be negative.
So it’s time to embrace that ROI is a part of the story and it is our job to make sure we balance ROI with other metrics that show where social delivers incremental value.
Clear ROI is part of a successful social media strategy. Image source: iStockPhoto.
#2: Your Boss Will Demand ROI
There is no denying that management teams and business owners are questioning whether your efforts are delivering results. The 2011 Jive Social Business Index Survey revealed that only 27% of executives with budget control for social media felt that social media is a top strategic priority. 47% of the respondents said a social plan was necessary but not a strategic priority.
This shows you that the jury is still out on whether social media is a mission-critical piece of the marketing mix, at least for those who control the purse strings.
The majority understands that social media is important at some level for the business, but it’s clear there’s still skepticism. I think we can all admit that if the people who control our budget still aren’t sold on whether social media can drive business results, they will continue to invest cautiously.
This means it’s important to be able to show quantifiable results from your efforts. If you aren’t able to demonstrate the strategy is delivering a financial return, you may find that optimism quickly turns to pessimism as other activities are shown to produce results, and your budget could just as quickly disappear.
Show quantifiable results. Image source: iStockPhoto.
#3: Social Media is Resource-Intensive
I think we can all agree that the days of saying that social media is FREE are over. We realize that a successful social media strategy takes a lot of time, and for many of us it’s time we simply don’t have.
The Social Media Marketing Industry Report revealed “a significant 59% of marketers are using social media for 6 hours or more and 33% for 11 or more hours weekly.” That’s a lot of time, considering that social media isn’t our only job. For many of us, social media is something that has been added to our already full plate.
This has led more people to start outsourcing aspects like content development because they simply can’t produce enough content to generate results in the time they have.
One of the first questions I get from executives is whether they should include the cost of employee time and/or salaries in their social media ROI calculations. They want to understand whether the time employees are spending is worth the expense.
It isn’t because they are trying to launch a war against social media. It is simply a matter of prioritizing resources to the highest-performing initiatives. And if social media can’t be quantified to show a return to the organization, it gets harder to justify the time and budget that is being dedicated to it.
Include the cost of employee time. Image source: iStockPhoto.
#4: You Can’t Expand Without ROI
There are a lot of companies out there that have seen tremendous success in developing large followings and now they’re asking, “Now what?”
The smart marketers didn’t jump into every social media network right away; rather they tested and became awesome in a couple that matters to their business. But now they feel they have demonstrated that social media can work and want to expand into other social networks.
In other situations, marketers realize they need to produce more content because they see the most positive results around the release of new content, but they can’t handle any more internally.
Whatever your scenario is, you won’t be able to secure additional budget dollars to fund your expansion plans if you haven’t demonstrated that the budget that has already been invested delivered a positive return to the organization.
Return isn’t measured in fans and followers; it is measured in dollars and cents. If you want to expand, you need to get serious about measuring social media’s bottom line.
Understand your social media ROI to expand and extend your reach. Image source: iStockPhoto.
#5: Optimization is Critical to Success
While all the other reasons relate to why social media ROI is important for the needs of other people, this one is for you. You are spending time, energy and budget on making social media a success. If you really want it to be successful, it’s critical that you understand what’s actually working and what isn’t.
We all want to prioritize our efforts to the things that produce the highest result, but if you aren’t measuring what’s delivering, you have no idea what you should be doing more of. Further, you won’t be able to test how little tweaks impact important things like conversion rates.
If you truly want to show that social media is a mission-critical element to business, then you need to measure ROI so you can tell exactly what’s working or showing promise and then optimize it.
Optimize until you can’t optimize any more. Imagine if you knew which status update delivered the most conversions for the day. Or which path from social media to the website converted the most leads. Information like that would really help you show a positive ROI in no time.
Get the data you need to improve your results. Image source: iStockPhoto.
What do you think? Why is social media ROI important to you? Why is it important to your boss? Are you measuring today? If so, what type of results are you seeing? Please add a comment in the box below and join the discussion.
Images from iStockPhoto.
5 Simple Metrics to Track Your Social Media Efforts
Are you looking for simple, straightforward metrics to measure the impact of your social media efforts?
Social networks and blogs continue to dominate Americans’ time online (accounting for nearly a quarter of total time spent on the Internet) according to a recent Nielsen report on social media, .
While we all know how important it is to market through the various social networks, it is vital to track and measure your efforts for success.
Here are five simple metrics to find out whether your social media effort is paying dividends.
#1: Examine Referring Traffic
Google Analytics is a fantastic way to measure how much traffic is being referred to your website from the various social channels.
Under the Traffic Sources tab, click on Referring Sites and then type in your social network of choice to see how much traffic is being referred. Set up goals based on the actions you want your visitors to complete.
Quick Tip: For Twitter referrals, search both Twitter and t.co, which is the built-in Twitter link shortener.
Increasing referral traffic from social sites is a good indicator that your social efforts are moving the needle in the right direction.
#2: Review the Quality and Relevance of Content
Content is the fuel for your social media engine, but if it’s not relevant and useful, it’s a waste of digital space.
The correct way to assess the value of a piece of content is not by continuously checking every five minutes to see if your retweet count goes up or if someone comments on your blog. These “vanity metrics” give a false sense of hope that your content is generating leads for your brand or business.
Instead of judging the success of your content by the feel-good double-digit share button, pull back the curtain and see what’s really going on.
For each piece of content you create, monitor unique page views, time on page and total pages viewed. If unique page views go up, that’s an indication that your reach is growing, increased time on page shows that your content is interesting to the visitor and increased total page views means your visitor wants to learn more by clicking on other pages around your site.
You can easily track these three mentions within Google Analytics by clicking on the Content tab, then choosing Overview. This will give you a snapshot of your top pieces of content along with detailed metrics including page views, unique page views and time on page. Drilling down into your content with Google Analytics is a great way to determine which content is resonating with your audience.
#3: Look at Share of Voice
With social media, share of voice refers to the number of conversations about your company versus your competitors/market. The value of online customer and prospect interaction can be tied to the share of voice (SOV) metric, which I like to call “The Big Picture Show.”
Segment brand mentions by social channel to uncover opportunities for improvement. You may find that your efforts on one particular channel are going unnoticed, but excelling on another channel.
The formula for calculating SOV is simple: divide the number of conversations or mentions of your brand by total number of conversations or mentions about other brands in your market.
To get your total number of conversations you can use a free tool such as SocialMention or if you have the budget, a more robust tool such as Radian6 has a widget that can calculate this metric for you.
Share of Voice = Your Mentions / (Total Mentions for Competitive Companies/Brands)
Share of voice: the number of conversations about your brand versus your competitors/market.
#4: Track the Total Size of Community and Engagement
Measuring and tracking the size of your collective communities is essential in determining whether you are adding value through your social strategy. Using a social CRM tool is a great way to integrate customer data with social profiles and interactions while monitoring growth and engagement levels.
Social CRM tools such as Sprout Social aggregate your activity into one easy-to-view dashboard where you can quickly see whether your strategy is moving in the right direction. Sprout offers a pretty good view of your basic metrics, including engagement and total size, and even goes a step further with recommendations for influencers to focus on.
Social CRM tools are an easy way to manage and track your profiles and activity all in one place.
#5: Measure Sentiment
Sentiment analysis is imperfect at best, often ignoring the human element of sarcasm or simple context. To be completely accurate, you need to track this manually.
Go through your mentions and tag them as positive, neutral or negative. Add up the totals and measure over time. Are the good mentions growing and the negative mentions decreasing?
Sentiment analysis can be thought of as "opinion mining."
Track Your Social Media Return on Effort
The social metrics used to determine success are the ones that make sense for your business and that you can tie back to your marketing bottom line.
Building a simple dashboard manually or using a social CRM tool as mentioned above is an easy way to track and update these metrics on a weekly or monthly basis. You can then monitor trends and set goals for growth based on what’s working.
If your metrics are not moving in the right direction or seem to be stalled, try mixing up your messaging and experimenting with different posting times and frequency.
What do you think? Does your business measure ROE? Which metrics are most important to your social strategy? Join the conversation and leave your questions and comments below.
5 Simple Metrics to Track Your Social Media Efforts
Are you looking for simple, straightforward metrics to measure the impact of your social media efforts?
Social networks and blogs continue to dominate Americans’ time online (accounting for nearly a quarter of total time spent on the Internet) according to a recent Nielsen report on social media, .
While we all know how important it is to market through the various social networks, it is vital to track and measure your efforts for success.
Here are five simple metrics to find out whether your social media effort is paying dividends.
#1: Examine Referring Traffic
Google Analytics is a fantastic way to measure how much traffic is being referred to your website from the various social channels.
Under the Traffic Sources tab, click on Referring Sites and then type in your social network of choice to see how much traffic is being referred. Set up goals based on the actions you want your visitors to complete.
Quick Tip: For Twitter referrals, search both Twitter and t.co, which is the built-in Twitter link shortener.
Increasing referral traffic from social sites is a good indicator that your social efforts are moving the needle in the right direction.
#2: Review the Quality and Relevance of Content
Content is the fuel for your social media engine, but if it’s not relevant and useful, it’s a waste of digital space.
The correct way to assess the value of a piece of content is not by continuously checking every five minutes to see if your retweet count goes up or if someone comments on your blog. These “vanity metrics” give a false sense of hope that your content is generating leads for your brand or business.
Instead of judging the success of your content by the feel-good double-digit share button, pull back the curtain and see what’s really going on.
For each piece of content you create, monitor unique page views, time on page and total pages viewed. If unique page views go up, that’s an indication that your reach is growing, increased time on page shows that your content is interesting to the visitor and increased total page views means your visitor wants to learn more by clicking on other pages around your site.
You can easily track these three mentions within Google Analytics by clicking on the Content tab, then choosing Overview. This will give you a snapshot of your top pieces of content along with detailed metrics including page views, unique page views and time on page. Drilling down into your content with Google Analytics is a great way to determine which content is resonating with your audience.
#3: Look at Share of Voice
With social media, share of voice refers to the number of conversations about your company versus your competitors/market. The value of online customer and prospect interaction can be tied to the share of voice (SOV) metric, which I like to call “The Big Picture Show.”
Segment brand mentions by social channel to uncover opportunities for improvement. You may find that your efforts on one particular channel are going unnoticed, but excelling on another channel.
The formula for calculating SOV is simple: divide the number of conversations or mentions of your brand by total number of conversations or mentions about other brands in your market.
To get your total number of conversations you can use a free tool such as SocialMention or if you have the budget, a more robust tool such as Radian6 has a widget that can calculate this metric for you.
Share of Voice = Your Mentions / (Total Mentions for Competitive Companies/Brands)
Share of voice: the number of conversations about your brand versus your competitors/market.
#4: Track the Total Size of Community and Engagement
Measuring and tracking the size of your collective communities is essential in determining whether you are adding value through your social strategy. Using a social CRM tool is a great way to integrate customer data with social profiles and interactions while monitoring growth and engagement levels.
Social CRM tools such as Sprout Social aggregate your activity into one easy-to-view dashboard where you can quickly see whether your strategy is moving in the right direction. Sprout offers a pretty good view of your basic metrics, including engagement and total size, and even goes a step further with recommendations for influencers to focus on.
Social CRM tools are an easy way to manage and track your profiles and activity all in one place.
#5: Measure Sentiment
Sentiment analysis is imperfect at best, often ignoring the human element of sarcasm or simple context. To be completely accurate, you need to track this manually.
Go through your mentions and tag them as positive, neutral or negative. Add up the totals and measure over time. Are the good mentions growing and the negative mentions decreasing?
Sentiment analysis can be thought of as "opinion mining."
Track Your Social Media Return on Effort
The social metrics used to determine success are the ones that make sense for your business and that you can tie back to your marketing bottom line.
Building a simple dashboard manually or using a social CRM tool as mentioned above is an easy way to track and update these metrics on a weekly or monthly basis. You can then monitor trends and set goals for growth based on what’s working.
If your metrics are not moving in the right direction or seem to be stalled, try mixing up your messaging and experimenting with different posting times and frequency.
What do you think? Does your business measure ROE? Which metrics are most important to your social strategy? Join the conversation and leave your questions and comments below.
