Measuring Social Media ROI for Your Business

What is Social Media ROI?

Social media ROI is defined as the return on investment from your social media efforts; and, usually, this ROI is a combination of all your social media actions that generate some type of value divided by the investment, both time and financial, you made to achieve those outcomes. So, in a nutshell, you’ll want to know if all your time and money was worth the return. Was it? Let’s find out how to know together.

How to Define Social Media Return on Investment

Before you can define the social media ROI for your business, you need to have a clear vision of what the purpose of social media is for your brand. From engagement and brand awareness to video views and transactions, social media plays a different role in the digital marketing strategy for each business; and, once you know what the purpose of your social media efforts are for your brand, you can start defining your social media return on investment.

Think of your social media ROI as an actionable goal; you want to achieve this specific goal (i.e. engagement, brand awareness, video views, transactions, etc.) by using social media efforts. When setting your actionable goal, make sure it’s based on someone taking a measurable action that can be tracked. Some of the most common actionable goals include:

• Contact Form Inquiries
• Purchases
• Downloads
• Email List Sign-Ups

And, on the other side of actionable goals, you’ll want to steer clear of striving to attain metrics that don’t go deep enough to truly understand and assess your social media ROI; these metrics include:

• Social Shares
• Followers
• Traffic

Someone clicking on a link in one of your social media posts to then go on to your website is great, but tracking the user’s intentions shouldn’t stop there. You’ll want to know whether or not that click is resulting in a sale, download, subscription, or other meaningful interaction.

Measuring Social Media ROI

After you’ve established your actionable goals, it’s time to use the proper tools to set them up and track them. One of the easiest and most common ways to set up and track your social media efforts and goal progression is by using Google Analytics. At Top Floor, we use Google Analytics on a daily basis to evaluate various metrics that relate to social media goals. This tool is extremely helpful because you can implement your specific goal and even give that goal a value to help you truly measure the social media return on investment for your business.

In order to set up your actionable goal in Google Analytics, you’ll need to click on the Admin View of your Google Analytics account. From there, navigate the Goals tab in the correct view of your Google Analytics account.

Once in the Goals tab, click on + New Goal. After hitting the + New Goal button, you’ll be prompted with settings for your new conversion. When the settings appear, you’ll need to choose what type of goal you’ll be tracking. At Top Floor, we almost always defer to a Custom goal because it allows us to uniquely tailor each goal to exactly what we want to be tracking.

 After choosing what type of goal you’ll be tracking, you’ll need to give this goal a description that indicates how this goal will be tracked. The final step before verifying your goal is to give it details that tell Google what to be looking for based on the description and setup provided. After listing the details of your goal, be sure to hit the Save button so that your goal begins being tracked.

Now that your actionable goal is properly set up in Google Analytics, it will begin tracking once you receive form submissions, purchases, downloads, and more! And, with this type of data, you will have the information you need to identify whether or not your actionable goal is taking the right steps towards your social media return on investment.

Social Media Services at Top Floor

At Top Floor, we live and breathe social media marketing. Our services can help your business define your actionable goals, track the progress of these goals, and understand your unique social media ROI. We like to think of ourselves as your social media coach, and we encourage you to learn more about our social media marketing services and contact us with any questions you have.