Social media marketing expert Danny Brown wrote this valuable blog post about simple and immediate ways you can measure ROI on social media activities. Not everyone in PR is a whiz or even knowledgeable about ROI measures, so this information is helpful.
It must be noted that these are mostly output measures, not results measures, so more work would be needed to determine what to do with the data and what the end results should be, eg sales of products or services, attendance at events, and other behavior change.
There’s a popular misconception that it’s difficult to use targeted metrics to measure social media’s return on investment (ROI). That’s not true. Nor is social media only good for measuring brand awareness. The fact is social media can offer good metrics for measuring ROI. All you need to do is set your success guides—what you want to achieve and how long it will take—and measure your results against them.
Here are six simple metrics for the main social networks that you can use to measure your social media ROI across earned, owned and paid media:
A key component of many (if not most) social media campaigns, blogger outreach programs can offer some of the best results of any marketing tactic. Measuring your success isn’t too difficult, either. All you have to do is determine the answers to the following questions:
Twitter not only offers instant eyeballs, but great returns. Again, measuring your impact is relatively simple:
Although it has its critics (including me), Facebook offers some great built-in tools and demographic options to help gauge a campaign’s success:
More than just a fun place to see kids hurt themselves on bikes, YouTube is a key tool in any marketing campaign—just ask the companies that used it during this year’s Super Bowl.
Here are the questions you should ask:
As marketing evolves, the different ways to reach an audience combine to create new outlets. Mobile marketing is the perfect complement to social marketing, and is easy to measure:
These questions offer just some of the immediate ways you can measure your social media success. There are more ways to measure your success, including monitoring tools and more defined analytics. Which ones you use will depend on the goals you’ve set and how you define success.
No matter how you collect the information you need, it all comes down to comparing the time expended and financial outlay to your return.
It’s important to remember that marketing can come down to luck and circumstance as much as brilliant strategy – timing and a welcoming audience are key. The one thing you can control, however, is measurement, and with social media and mobile marketing, measurement has never been easier.
By Silvia Arto, Vice President of the Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communication Management, Chair of the European Regional
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