Every solid social media strategy should involve setting measurable goals and evaluating them periodically. Sometimes you’ll hit your goals and need to create more aggressive ones, and sometimes you may have to scale back and make different adjustments. Business owners are very familiar with ROI and likely measure it frequently. However, measuring social media ROI is not quite as common as it should be. Knowing your social media ROI can help you determine what social network marketing strategies effectively boost your bottom line, rather than simply evaluating how many likes or comments your posts get. Here’s why measuring social media ROI is important and what you should be measuring.

Why Measuring ROI Is Essential For Your Social Media Strategy

The hardest part of measuring social media ROI is you don’t have a lot of statistical data to base your decisions on. Instead, measurables include interactions, engagements, customer sentiment, brand awareness, and other similar factors. The number of followers or likes you get may tell you a little bit about how successful your social media marketing plan is, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. What needs to be measured also is things like what percentage of those new followers converted into a sale and then a possible repeat sale. The metrics you choose to evaluate are critical to helping you develop the right social media strategy for your company.

Which Metrics Should You Evaluate?

Social media metrics that are tied to conversion rates are the easiest to measure and evaluate. Some of those metrics include:

• Social media reach
• Engagements
• Mentions
• Sentiment analysis
• Share of voice
• Hashtags 

Certain social media monitoring tools can help you evaluate these metrics to determine your ROI. For example, if your specific social media marketing plan includes seeing how far your posts extend across different social media channels, then you also want to know how many of those shares turned into conversions. The metrics themselves are interesting to see how well a particular campaign worked, but if it doesn’t lead to a boost in your bottom line, then you may have to make some adjustments so it becomes more profitable.

Focus On Achievable Goals And Adjust When Necessary

Setting achievable goals should be a part of every social media strategy. But what you also have to consider is your expenses, like the cost of your content, any tools you’ve invested in, advertisements you purchased, and even the time you’ve spent on the campaign. Your expenses may be more than your sales as you begin your campaign, but if you start by setting achievable goals and making adjustments along the way, then you’ll slowly begin seeing your ROI be worth it.

Blazing Social helps business owners put together social media marketing strategies based on qualitative and quantitative data. This means we look at metrics in different ways to ensure a particular strategy is effective in boosting your bottom line, rather than just looking good from a numbers perspective. We work with each of our clients individually, so feel free to contact us at any time to see how we can help you reach your specific social media goals.