Measuring Social Media ROI: The Basics

Measuring Social Media ROI is a top-of-the mind subject for most business owners. Today I want to talk to you about the basics of measuring your social networking followers.

There are two important things that you have to have in place before we can calculate the strength of your social networking followers. First, you must have some kind of call to action on your website that entices people to become a lead/customer for your product or service. This can be any form (preferably on your website) where people can submit information for you to contact them directly. Or, if you sell a product, purchase your product directly.

Secondly, it is important that you have some kind of tracking system in place that allows you to see how many visitors came to your website, how many of them answered your call to action, and where these people came from. Without this, you have to rely on communication and word of mouth to get a rough idea on how many people found you on social networking websites. I use Google's free Analytics service, which does all of that for me. Once you have those two things in place, you'll be able to do basic calculations on how many active followers you have.

How to measure a follower's value

o Look at the total number of clicks to your website from each social media platform in a month, and divide that by the number of posts you made. This gives you an average visit per post.
o Look at page views per visit, time spent on site and visitor paths to identify what percentage of social media visitors become leads or customers.
o Using these metrics, you can find out how many of your social networking followers actually show interest in your company, or, actually purchased from your company.

Now, this is a very basic way of calculating the monetary ROI (return on investment) of your followers, but also gives you a better idea on how many of your followers are interested in furthering their relationships with you, and your business. While you're doing these calculations, it's also not a bad idea to see how many people commented on or interacted with your social networking page. These people should not be forgotten when calculating the traffic generated on your website, the reason being is that most social networking websites publish a link to your profile on that person's profile when they comment on your business page. This can spark viral marketing, and possibly gain you more customers.

ROI measurements are another subject that goes very deep with social networking, and is too much to cover in this small report. Another important avenue to look into is the importance of customer retention for your company. You need to measure the effect that customer retention has on your company (what will losing a customer cost your company). Since social networking is a perfect way to build and establish relationships (and help people with their problems) you can use these new online measures as a form of customer service. Finally, you want to measure how many people are now actively talking about your community online, or interacting with you online. To get the highest ROI of social media marketing, you will have to measure each of these three avenues, based on your company's numbers.

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