Introduction

Before we get into it, we need to be clear on one thing – ROI doesn’t have to be financial.Of course, we all want to make trillions of money selling our products and services on social media, but given the complexity of attribution modeling with social media, we often don’t get a linear picture of how people are interacting with ads from awareness to purchase.

Therefore, ROI can absolutely be anything that’s important to your brand – whether it’s awareness metrics, engagement metrics, conversions or revenue

Every company has their own view on ROI. Some like to attribute a dollar for dollar value, while others prefer to measure in terms of thought leadership and return on relationship value.

Let’s see the Highlights of Social Media ROI

What is social media ROI?
Return on investment (ROI) as it relates to your social media efforts is a measurement of its efficiency.

Why is it important?

To put it simply, tracking progress and performance is key. How else would you know how your efforts are affecting business and performance levels? How do you prove value? Promoting your services and products on social media requires time, resources and money. Whether you’re focusing on a completely organic social media approach, social advertising or both, you’re fueling it with resources and its worth knowing the value that you put in.

It will vary from business to business depending on objectives and goals. It might be measured in dollars, or perhaps the number of leads accumulated. Ultimately, the definition of social media ROI will align with the value social media has on your business.

By Measuring Your Social Media ROI, you can:

• Improve marketing efforts
• Monitor the effects of your changes
• Taking the steps to a successful ROI

Likes, retweets, shares and comments are not conversions. Conversions are where social media users respond to your call(s) to action, for example when they:

• Click a link and visit your website
• Watch your video
• Click your ‘Shop now’ button (and actually buy something)
• Subscribe to your product, service or newsletter
• Download your app

Before you can measure your social media ROI, it’s crucial to nail down some important components that will help you prove the value of your social marketing efforts.

Calculate Your Reach

You need to determine how many people you could potentially connect with on social media. Your content reach is limited only to the amount of friends and followers that people who engage with your brand have.

Time & Trust

Every single comment, photo, video or post takes a few seconds for a user to understand. Now, you need to look at how many close friends shared the brand experience.

Sentiment

This is a measure of how your business is perceived on social networks. It can be extremely difficult to measure sentiment although you do need to compare the number of positive and negative mentions. Fortunately, you don’t have to spend hours painstakingly going through tweets to find out what is being said. It is possible to get natural language processing tools from a variety of sites online that will quickly and effectively help you discover whether mentions of your company are positive or negative.

Metrics

If you really wish to calculate the ROI on social media, it is imperative that your company has clearly defined goals because ROI is impossible to calculate without a baseline of some sort. When it comes to calculating your ROI, it’s essential to note that you need to focus on what the numbers lead to rather than concentrating solely on the actual numbers.

Using The Data

This is where it gets tough and is also where certain experts suggest that social media ROI can’t be accurately measured. And they have a point because coming up with the dollars and cents of your campaign is virtually impossible to nail down because there is some guesswork involved. Nonetheless, you can give it a pretty good go.

There are five basic steps to computing your social media ROI. They are as follows:

• Identify key performance indicators (KPIs)
• Align social media goals and business objectives
• Track results
• Assign values to your KPIs
• Analyze results

Summary:
Measuring social media ROI is tricky, but it’s not impossible. As long as you’re realistic about the data, and the process by which you measure your efforts, you can get a clear idea of what your social media marketing initiatives are actually producing for your brand.

Once you measure your return on investment, don’t stop there. It isn’t enough to calculate and not make the necessary adjustments based on your findings.

The best advice:
Continue to learn about your social media advertising efforts and make improvements. Your ROI will help you understand what areas you can improve on.

Growing your ROI results is critical to your continued success and it has never been more important than it is today. At the same time, it is important for you to identify those elements in your social media marketing strategy that aren’t working effectively. Those should be eliminated and new elements should be put in their place.

“Assess the requirements, Explore the opportunities and Implement the changes and Succeed – Sky is the limit”.