How to calculate the social media marketing ROI ?

Social media occupies a prominent position in the marketing calendar and its ROI can be calculated in the following steps:

  1. What are your goals for social media marketing ?

Social media marketing campaigns have relationship goals such as trust, commitment and understanding the customer. The campaign needs to be designed at the outset keeping these goals in mind. Also, ideally these goals should somewhere link to the business goals of the organisation or product which will make the campaign more meaningful for the company. Social Media needs to be tied to the big picture and linked to organisational and departmental goals.

  1. Measure

The goals set out need to be converted into measurable metrics such as if the goal is creating more customer trust then there will be primary and secondary indicators. The primary indicators can be the no. of likes, shares or re-tweets and the secondary parameters can be the number of conversions and site traffic generated during the period the campaign was run.

  1. Use Social Media Analytics Tools

Once you have established your goals and what to measure, you need to start tracking the diverse metrics through the various social media tools. The top tools that can be used are google analytics, salesforce, hootsuite analytics, social dynamx and Here is a little about them so that you can select the right tool:

  1. Google analytics: Helps to track website traffic, onsite conversions and signups originating from social media marketing campaigns
  2. Salesforce: when used with software like Marketo, will help in tracking sales leads back to specific messages
  3. Hootsuite analytics: provides a multiple analytic tools to help you track your reach, conversion etc.
  1.   Calculate your social media ROI

The ability to track should be built into everything one does on social media so that it is easier to see  the worth of any campaign. One can create analytics templates which will allow us to track desired metrics without building custom reports for each campaign. These reports also represent data in a digestable manner so that the reports can be shared across the organisation. One needs to keep checking the metrics very frequently to ensure that the campaign is meeting its goals. The lifecycle of the campaigns is very short so one needs to stay on the top of the data as it happens. It is also possible to program for the reports to be sent to your email several times in the week without even pulling out the reports yourself.

  1. Improve

The whole point  of tracking is not only to prove the worth of your social media campaign but also to increase its value over time. The tracking will help you identify what is working and what is not so the required corrective measures can be taken to give the required direction to the campaign.

Social media is never static and to meet your social media ROI goals, one will need to adapt their strategy based on the changing results of the metrics they are tracking.




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