This week I was honored to present at the Social Media Club of St. Charles April event, where I spoke about social media analytics and ROI tracking.
During the presentation I covered three areas of social media measurements:
- Social Media Metrics
- Social Media Measurement Tools
- Measuring the ROI of Your Social Media Efforts
The full presentation can be found below!
Social Media Metrics
Social media metrics fall within four different categories:
- Increase in community membership
- Content mobility and engagement
- Market perception
- Social conversions
Increase in Community Membership
Your social media community membership is measured by the number of followers, likes, and subscribers that have connected with your brand on social media networks. This measurement is important because it shows your brand’s increasing reach and brand awareness. However, this is not the only metric that should be measured. To determine if you are reaching the correct audience and connecting with them you will need to measure content mobility and engagement, and above all social conversions.
Content Mobility and Engagement
The mobility of your content and the engagement of your online community is measured by how many times and how often your content is shared. There are several metrics that you can track to determine if your audience is engaging in what you share, including:
- Facebook post likes and shares
- Tweets directly from content
- Retweets
- YouTube video likes, shares, and embeds
- Pinterest repins
- LinkedIn post likes and shares
Market Perception
Market perception is measured by the sentiment of brand mentions on social media. You will want to track mentions either month-by-month and/or over a given period of time to determine if there is an increase in positive mentions and a decrease in negative mentions. Other metrics that can help you to measure brand sentiment is number of people who hid Facebook post or mentioned a post in a negative way. These metrics can be found in Facebook Page Insights.
Social Conversions
The goal of all social media efforts is to drive traffic back to your website (your home base), to convert visitors into leads, and then into customers. It is important to measure the total number of click-throughs to website from each social media source to determine where your most engaged and profitable audience is located.
Social Media Measurement Tools
There are a vast amount of tools available to help you measure your social media efforts. But, in the presentation I discuss 8 of my favorite tools:
- Hootsuite
- SocialBro
- SproutSocial
- Google Analytics
- ShareThis Plugin
- SimplyMeasured
- SocialMention
- Gremlin
Check out the full presentation below for the benefits of each tool.
Measuring ROI of Social Media Efforts
Measuring the ROI of social media has become on of the biggest challenges for businesses and agencies alike. The presentation explains how both e-commerce and non e-commerce websites can measure social media return on investment.
Social Media ROI for E-commerce Sites
E-commerce sites can track social media sales and visitors by adding the Google Analytics e-commerce tracking code to their site. By setting up goals and using the conversion reports feature in Google Analytics, you can determine when a visitor has converted into a customer or lead, as well as the number transactions completed by social media visitors from a specific network. (i.e. Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, etc.)
Savings: Social Media vs. Paid Media
Are your social efforts generating more results than what you would see with paid media?
This can be answered by calculating how much it would cost to buy the same number of social impressions and actions with paid media as you do organically. To determine actual savings, use the Facebook ads, Twitter promoted tweets, YouTube promoted videos, and Google AdWords PPC advertising prices in your calculations.
Revenue from Social Media
Another way that non-e-commerce sites can determine social media ROI is by analyzing how views of goal pages, social media visits to goal pages, and the average sale price are connected. The formula to calculate the estimated revenue from social media can be found in the presentation below.
Brianna, I would say, along with increased numbers in community engagement, you would also need to understand who your audience is. While Google Analytics does a good job of letting us know the demography of visitors to our website, we also need to get an impression on our Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook followers as they are so diverse and channel-specific. In the early stages of an organization’s social media planning, audience segmentation is easy to achieve. A quarterly survey and email marketing would also go a long way towards understanding the demography. This is also important because Analytics doesn’t weed out the spam followers from the serious / engaged supporters.