Are You Getting Enough Bang For Your Ad Buck on Social?

Measuring social media performance is difficult, but there is a solution!

18 Jul 2016

By Tim Hill, Social Status founder and tutor of ADMA IQ’s Social Meda Marketing Essentials course.

The Social Media ROI Framework is an open source, cross-channel measurement framework for social media that enables you to communicate the performance of your social media activity to management, clients or stakeholders.

Take it, use it in your organization and share it!

The methodology

We’ve simplified the process by basing the Social ROI Framework on two benchmarking models used by millions of marketers around the world: The Paid, Owned, Earned (POE) Model and the Marketing Funnel.

Paid, owned, earned model

As digital marketing emerged in the early 2000s the POE model became widely adopted. The POE model is all about segmenting your activity into 3 buckets:
• Paid or bought media: eg Facebook sponsored post, promoted Tweet
• Media you publish on your page or profile: eg Facebook post, Instagram post
• Media about your brand / organisation published by someone else: eg Tweet from a customer, mentioning your product

There's no shortage of opinion pieces proclaiming the death of the POE model, in favour of Converged media (posts or activity that can be classified across 2 or 3 segments). Here’s an example: you publish a post on Facebook about your upcoming Summer Sale. That post is owned. The next day you decide to boost it with ad spend. Now that post is technically both paid and owned. You can see where this model starts to break down.

The important thing to keep in mind is the Social ROI Framework uses the POE model as a way to segment metrics, as opposed to content. So in the above example of the Summer Sale post it is irrelevant that it can be classified as both paid and owned. We’re just looking purely at the performance metrics: paid performance metrics such as cost and ROI and owned performance metrics such as engagement and click-throughs.

Marketing funnel

The marketing funnel is almost a fundamental marketing concept. It’s been around for several decades and even predates the invention of the Internet. At its core, the marketing funnel defines the basic journey that any user or customer takes from awareness, to interest, to desire, to action (AIDA). Today there are many elaborate customer journey maps and sophisticated visualizations that seek to replace the humble funnel. I believe the marketing funnel is by far the simplest way to represent the customer journey, while communicating the varying levels of business value at each step of the journey.

Implementation process

There are 6 steps to take into consideration when implementing the Social ROI Framework:

  1. Set baseline performance. This just means start measuring. Don’t worry about goals or targets, or whether performance is good or bad. You need to set a baseline before you do anything else. A good timeframe is one month.
  2. Define a benchmarking set. Identify a competitor set that will allow you to perform competitor benchmarking. If your organisation doesn’t have any competitors, or your competitors aren’t active on social media, consider a benchmarking set of organisations that are related, or speak to the same kind of people.
  3. Highlight your priority metrics. The Social ROI Framework contains 18 metrics in total. Your stakeholders are only likely to be realistically interested in a handful. The great thing about the Framework is it allows you to communicate the big picture, but then pull out the key metrics that the business cares about the most.
  4. Set KPI’s on baseline, competitors and/or budget. Setting KPIs becomes so much easier when you can track consecutive weeks and months of performance and how this compares against your competitors.
  5. Implement workflow processes. Put resources or processes in place to automate or speed up your reporting.
  6. Measure and repeat. Track your performance against historical and competitor performance weekly and/or monthly.

The framework

Make sure you're on top of your social media game and sign up for ADMA IQ’s Social Meda Marketing Essentials course.

Learn to:

    - Identify all the major social channels
    - Plan an effective social media campaign
    - Tailor content to the appropriate channel
    - Engage the right consumer in the right space
    - Measure and optimise your social media activity

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CATEGORY Social Media

TYPE Article