Social Media ROI: What You Should Be Doing and Why

Social media is not solely about making a direct conversion, but it does play a key role in the sales funnel. As such, it should be properly tracked to ensure that conversions are occurring as a result of social efforts. Social media is all about building relationships, developing bonds, reduce your overall marketing Costs and influencing customer conversions—and if you’re not tracking the effectiveness of your social media campaigns properly, you could be missing out on important details that could lead you to higher conversions and an improved social media ROI.

Before people in digital marketing were focusing on when page hits, fan counts and traffic. Today’s campaigns are all about converting the strangers to, visitors, leads, leads, followers, customers and then promoters. Reliable indicators as to what constitutes an effective social media campaign are out there—you just need to know what you should be doing to track ROI (and why).

There are constant conversations about the ROI of social media because most businesses take actions completely based upon dollar amounts. Many associate social engagements on the various platforms as a part of the overall sales funnel, but a lot of the time aren’t able to connect ecommerce to engagement. Google Analytics has recently gotten one step closer to defining this relationship. By adding the ability to track social media plugins installed on your website, Google Analytics can track the actions of a social engaged user and begin to quantifying the relationship between their social actions and their behavior on your website

By setting up goals in Google Analytics, marketers can track the following:

• Actual social media referral traffic that comes into a website
• Conversions, such as:
• When someone from a social media referral purchases an item.
• When someone from a social media referral enters information into a form.
• When someone from a social media referral downloads a report or newsletter or other item from a site.
• When someone from a social media referral clicks on a social media button such as a “Follow us on Twitter” or “Like us on Facebook.”
• Bounce rate for visitors referred to a site from social media
• Average session time for visitors referred from social media

 

Tracking Social Media Engagement

Conversions occur when users interact with one another or with your brand. As such, it’s only fitting to say that one of the most effective ways to measure the effectiveness of a social media campaign is not to measure the number of fans or followers, but to monitor and analyze conversations and the effectiveness of social media engagement. According to a recent post on Moz.com, “engagement is a great goal, because it can impact the business by increasing traffic, growing brand awareness, talking with community members, showing your voice. But “engagement” isn’t a simple number like followers.”

Engagement refers to interactions with your brand, such as:

• Tweets
• Retweets
• Favorites
• Follows
• Shares
• Reshares
• Comments
• Likes

 As Moz.com points out, comments, views, and shares are great, but ultimately, they only report activity. They do not give you a clear picture of the outcomes that took place because of that activity. In order to obtain that type of insight into engagement, you also need to track a number of other elements, including conversation rate, amplification rate, applause rate, visits from each channel, and channel growth. Some metrics, such as conversation rate, are fairly easy to view and target at a glance. It's simply the number of comments or replies received on posts, pins, tweets, etc.

Things become a bit more complicated when you begin looking at metrics such as amplification rate, which refers to content that is amplified or shared. Every social media channel on the planet allows you to do this, so the potential here is massive. Applause rates are basically just what they sound like. They offer the opportunity for visitors to demonstrate their appreciation for posted content. Whether it is a Like on Facebook, a Favorite on Twitter, or a +1 on Google+, it all amounts to the same thing. 

Tracking engagement is made easier with various tools these days such as SproutSocial, which allows digital marketers to track social engagement of their brand by monitoring specific hashtags and topics.  In fact, SproutSocial now offers a specific Engagement Report that provides insight into trends in engagement. This analytics tool will also allow you to evaluate how you stack up against the competition.

The Bottom Line

When digital marketers make the shift from focusing on social media followers and friends to focusing on how those followers and friends convert into paying customers, the true power of social influence can be seen. Social growth, engagement metrics, and overall conversions that result from social media efforts are of paramount importance in every digital marketer’s arsenal. The marketers that employ effective social media conversion metrics to establish goals and to learn more about their social media marketing campaigns are likely to experience significant improvements in the number of customers that are gained or positively influenced through their social efforts