If you’re asked if social media can give you the desired ROI? What would you say?
Well, the answer depends on what to measure and how to measure. But many companies don’t know what are the right metrics to achieve their business goal on social media. For example, if you need traffic, you need to monitor metrics like top performing pages, most clicked content, best keyword etc. If you track Likes or Followers, it would not be at par with your expected social media ROI.
According to a CMO Survey in 2014, only 15% of marketers have a clear and definite approach towards social media ROI.
Social media ROI is no more a myth. Let’s see how companies are actually getting the best results using social platforms.
Cisco saved over $100,000 to launch their product with social media
Like other brands, Cisco, too, was not sure enough about social media ROI. But they took a high risk by depending on the social web for one of their top 5 launches. They needed to engage network engineers on social media for the launch. And their social assets were blog, Twitter, Facebook groups, Flickr, YouTube and Second Life.
Image - Social Media Examiner
At the end of the campaign, they managed to get 9,000 people attending the social media product launch, which was more than 90X compared to the previous launch events. In this course, they saved 42,000 gallons of gas, got 3X more media coverage, over 1,000 dedicated blog posts with 40 million social media impressions. And the total event cost them only one-sixth of the cost of a traditional launch.
Old Spice increased their sales by 107% with personalized videos
Old Spice is one of the early social media adopters. Their social media campaigns mostly deal with video marketing. But in order to take their social media presence to the next level, their agency WK was looking at a unique campaign idea.
So, they sent personalized video messages, featuring Mustafa, to their social media fans. This campaign earned them a huge positive buzz around the World Wide Web. As far as the ROI is concerned, sales increased by 55% within 3 months and after 6 months it went up to 107%.
Baseball Rose got 400% higher ROI on Facebook ads
Baseball Rose offers artificial roses made of real softballs and baseballs. They spent $200 on Facebook ads to grow their fan base. And in in turn, they made a $1,000 as revenue from that investment.
Subway found 71% increased traffic from social media, compared to traditional marketing
Subway designed their Slim Down Challenge campaign to sell tickets to an event and also to raise awareness on their weight loss program. They created a customized Facebook app along with implementing other traditional marketing methods like TV ads and newspaper ads.
But to their surprise, the Facebook app alone was responsible for the 71% of all traffic. It shows how important social media is, despite having TV and newspaper advertising.
How to measure social media ROI in just 4 steps:
Set a business goal: Every business must have a definite goal to achieve. It can include branding, clicks, website traffic, sales, email signup form submission, downloads, and engagement. Think of your business and choose wisely.
Deciding the right metrics for your business: The metrics is directly related to the business goal. For example, if your business goal is getting traffic from social media, metrics like clicks, time-spent on the site would work for you. On the other hand, if your business goal is engagement metrics like likes, comments, shares, and RTs would be important.
Measure the metrics once in three months: Once you set the goal and metrics, strategize and start working according to the plan. No strategy can show you results overnight. You need to give it some time. Three months is a good to measure the pre-determined metrics.
Check the results against the goals: While tracking metrics with analytics, make sure to measure it against the business goal. You must set a number as a goal. For example, let’s assume that you want 50,000 clicks on your content in three months. At the end of this tenure, you need to check if it’s close or you over-achieved. Accordingly, you need to reset your plan for the coming months.
Tools to measure and track social media results:
Facebook Insights: Facebook Insights is a built-in tool for business pages on the platform. You can track every activities of your fans on your content on Facebook. If you have set an external webpage for a campaign, you can also see the performance by simply implementing a Facebook pixel.
Twitter Analytics: Like Facebook, Twitter also has an integrated analytics tool that can help you measure the performance of your tweets. It can show you a detailed analysis on clicks, RTs, favorites, and overall reach. These data can help you understand what content is doing good to achieve your business goals.
Google analytics: Google Analytics is a free analytics tool that can show and analyze all the relevant data about your social media activities right from counting social sessions to monitoring conversations.
Klouts: Klout is a social media tool to monitor your social influence. So, this is the right choice for businesses that are looking at increasing brand authority. You can integrate multiple channels on Klout, so that it can calculate your entire activities on different social media.
Bit.ly: Bit.ly is a URL shortening tool that also offer an excellent analytics on clicks. So, if you want clicks on your content, this tool is an obvious choice for you. It will show you the clicks, along with the time of clicks and geo-location of the people, who clicked on your links. This would enable you to find the potential audience for your business.
These tips and tools will help you measure your social media efforts. However, if you are still feeling confused, leave us with your website and email address in the comment section, and we will be in touch with you with the right goals and metrics.