When it comes to social media, it has always been a widely discussed topic how to measure returns and a lot of the traditions from more traditional marketing has of course paved its way into the field of social media. Many businesses that wish to run a social media campaign of course want to set goals and plan what should be achieved in terms of concrete figures. So the key is look ahead, plan ahead and then work. While handling social media this rule of thumb of marketing should be especially remembered. In certain cases it’s good to do your math, plan what you want achieve from your campaign in terms of concrete figures and then work backwards.

A part of monitoring the efficiency of the campaign is to be working with some tools. There are plenty to choose from depending on your needs, strategy and budget. One of the widely used free tools is Google Analytics that will give you plenty of different graphs.

Methods:

In a traditional way, the key metrics to measure the effectiveness of social media are to look at Page views, Unique page views, followers, demographics, frequency of views, bounce rates and length of visits. All these metrics can be used to measure the success of content based campaigns, designed to increase  traction on the site, without any conversions. If on a certain day the graph of page views suddenly goes up, then it is possible that the content posted on your website or blog gained you a lot of readers and people would like to read more content designed on those lines.

ROI can also be measured in therms of increase in number of qualified clicks. Here we could also use customer life value (CLV) or the amount a customer would spend with the company throughout his loyalty period vs the cost of acquisition. If the CLV exceeds our acquisition spends, then the campaign is considered to be a success. Other ways to analyse return on social media are sales forecasting as well as comparison off current sales with last touch sales.

Lastly, a more qualitative approach will, however, be to look at the value of the conversations and relations gained through the social media presence. The most important part in social media is about building valuable and sustainable relations and therefore each relation to a customer or user can be of value to the business depending on what kind of contributions the user gives to the community, the scope of conversations or quality of conversations. So just to conclude, I feel that in certain cases it is possible to quantify your social media return while in others it can just be looked at the value of involvement and valuable conversations which add to the brand experience. There will always be ROI if you are able to create relations, dialogue and engagement in social media.

Do let me know your thoughts here ?

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Tags: campaigns, customer, measure, Social Media