Content Marketing Series: How To Measure Social Media ROI
For marketers, social media is a core channel for content marketing. It provides a platform for you to share your content and allows your content to travel further and reach more people.
Our last post in our Content Marketing Series covered the importance of measuring your content marketing ROI across every channel. Since many of those channels fall under the social media umbrella, let’s look at some specifics on measuring social media ROI.
What Is Social Media ROI (and Why Does It Matter?)
Social media ROI illustrates the total value generated from your content marketing investments via social media channels. Marketers should measure social media ROI to see how their efforts are paying off and attribute their accomplishments to their content’s impact.
Typically, we think of ROI in terms of a dollar amount. However, social media ROI can be measured using non-monetary metrics, too. The latter is often preferable because it can be challenging to trace the direct impact of content on a company’s revenue.
If your marketing efforts are more nascent, you might measure your social media ROI in terms of growth in followers, engagement (such as likes, comments or shares) or awareness as measured by impressions. A more mature marketing organization might want to track specific behaviors their social media activities are driving - clicks to a website or referral traffic, form completions, or even purchases. The success metrics you track should tie to your overall marketing objectives and support the larger goals of the business.
Why Is It Critical To Measure Social Media ROI?
Why measure the ROI of content on social media? Maybe a better question is, why wouldn’t you want to know the impact of your social media content? If you’re investing time, money, and effort into content marketing, you’ve earned the right to demonstrate your team’s effectiveness.
Marketers can use social media ROI to:
Demonstrate content marketing’s value to your organization
Justify the resources invested in content creation
Acquire a larger slice of the marketing budget for content purposes
See what your audience is and isn’t interested in so you can build on topics that draw them in and drive meaningful behavior
It’s true that knowledge is power, and there’s plenty of data to show you how and where your efforts are paying off.
How Do You Calculate Social Media ROI?
If you’re tracking your content marketing expenses, including labor time and cost for creating paid or organic social media campaigns to drive revenue, and can trace revenue back to a specific piece of content or campaign, then calculating social media ROI is possible.
Profit / Investment x 100 = Social Media ROI %
However, not all social media activity or content CAN be tied to revenue, nor is it meant to. Attributing a conversion or sale to a single piece of content requires complex technology and customer journey tracking systems that most companies - even our large enterprise clients - don’t invest in.
There’s also the matter of calculating social media content ROI beyond revenue. For example, you’ll have people who see or share your content but don’t make a purchase. Or you might gain new followers on social media who will continue to learn about your brand with every post. To calculate the value of non-monetary benefits, you’ll need to choose metrics that can put these softer values into context for the larger business.
Complicated, isn’t it? Work with your business leadership to understand their expectations and what they want to see. In our experience, most companies view their social media presence and activities as table stakes for doing business. Like a website, it’s the one of the places people will visit to learn more about a company that lends credibility and builds trust.
Measuring Social Media ROI at Different Stages of the Funnel
Getting a complete picture of the value of your social media activities requires marketers to select metrics that align with their content marketing objectives. This is easier to do when you consider the role social media plays at each stage of the sales funnel. Here are a few starting points:
AWARENESS STAGE
Goals
Increase brand awareness
Maximize engagement
Potential Metrics
Post reach
Follower growth
Engagement (likes, shares, comments)
CONSIDERATION STAGE
Goals
Build trust
Learn more about your audience
Potential Metrics
Click-through rate
Social Visits
Referral web traffic details (time on page, pages visited, bounce rate, etc)
DECISION STAGE
Goals
Increase conversions
Potential Metrics
Conversions (purchases, app installs, downloads, signups, etc.)
Direct Messages
Leads
This isn’t an exhaustive list, as each metric should relate back to your content’s purpose, audience and behavior you want to drive. But it can help you start thinking about the best ways to illustrate your success in ways that matter to your team and stakeholders.
Social Media ROI Tools
Using social media ROI tools lets you offload some of the heavy lifting in your calculations. Instead of manually collecting and analyzing your metrics, take advantage of built-in analytics and third-party technologies to give you insights at a glance.
Some examples include:
GOOGLE ANALYTICS
The quintessential website analytics tool, Google Analytics tracks things like traffic numbers, traffic sources, time on page, session data, user location, and other details. This helps marketers better attribute their website traffic to their social media content and know what channels are responsible for traffic and actions.
NATIVE PLATFORM ANALYTICS
Each social media platform offers its own suite of analytics. You can gain a baseline understanding of your audience and how they’re engaging with your content. This is helpful in identifying your top-performing posts and campaigns and seeing what your audience loves and wants from you. The capabilities of these platform analytics are limited, however for smaller or less mature marketing organizations they may provide enough insights to craft your ROI story back to the business.
SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE
Third-party social media management software, such as SEMRush, Hootsuite, or SproutSocial helps marketers organize and execute their social campaigns. While these solutions are more complicated to learn and set up, they tend to be an affordable way to gain efficiencies in executing social activities, saving countless labor hours. And because they also track the performance of your social presence, offering insights into engagement and audience data, they can be used to optimize and improve your ROI.
How To Increase Social Media ROI
If you’re not seeing the results you expected from your social media (or want to boost your ROI), don’t throw in the towel just yet. You might need to tweak your content or your approach (or both), and a simple fix might be all you need.
Start by gathering social intelligence to get inside your audience’s minds. Learning about the types of content your target audience engages with, the channels they’re active on, and their needs and wants that you can satisfy will help you create more impactful content.
You can also conduct organic experiments and test campaigns before going all-in with your advertising budget. For example, you could run A/B tests on a small audience sample before choosing your ad creative. Play around with audience segmentation tools to connect with the right people.
Level Up Your Content Marketing Efforts With Prime 8
Prime 8 consultants have extensive expertise in the multifaceted landscape of content marketing. From building personas and content frameworks to choosing content marketing software and KPIs, our team empowers yours with a content strategy that works for your brand. Let us help. Reach out with questions or to schedule a consultation!
