Did you hear how the global human population crossed 8 billion by the end of 2022? If you found that surprising, wait till you hear this: about half of this population is a verified social media user.
We’re not kidding; this Hootsuite report mentions how there are about 4.48 billion social media users in the world today. It also claims that 93% of the total internet users are on some or the other social media platform.
The growing popularity of social media platforms among netizens has made them the hotspot for businesses and brands to establish a connection with their target audience. As you can imagine, it has led to more businesses hiring a social media manager for their marketing team.
However, the problem arises when these managers are asked to show the ROI of their marketing efforts. Is the ROI for these platforms measurable? If so, how? These are the questions we aim to answer in this blog. Let’s get started!
The Importance of measuring social media ROI
Social media ROI is no different from any other kind of ROI or Return on Investment; it refers to the measurement of the tangible returns your business gains from its social media marketing efforts.
As with other areas of marketing, it’s only natural for a business to want to quantify the profit it makes from social media channels. It’s because this quantification helps them allocate the budget for their social media marketing.
Another benefit of measuring social media ROI is that it helps you analyze the performance of your social media marketing campaigns and strategies.
Knowing what is a hit among your target audience and what didn’t catch their attention so well will only better prepare your marketing team for the future. They can also make adjustments to their current approach with this analysis.
Before we move ahead to talk about the process of measuring your social media ROI, let’s share with you the formula that all marketers and businesses use for the same:
Social media ROI =
Profit made through social media/ Investment made on social media*100
Measuring Social Media ROI: A step-by-step process
Any brand or business that has hired a social media marketer knows that the ROI for these efforts can’t be measured that easily. The main reason behind this difficulty is the diverse nature of returns on them, which often stretch beyond the financial ones.
For instance, an attractive and meaningful social media presence can improve the chances of your brand awareness for your target audience. It can also result in customer loyalty which, while highly valuable, cannot be quantified.
To help the marketers out of this conundrum, we’ve designed a step-by-step process to navigate the path to social media ROI smoothly. Keep reading to learn all about it!
Step 1: Clearly defining your goals.
The first step of this process involves the clearly defining the business goals you aim to achieve through social media marketing. These goals will provide you a better standard to judge your social media ROI against and quantify its performance.
The core objective behind these marketing efforts is generally to create brand awareness. But to measure your social media ROI more accurately, it’s best to dig deeper and come up with narrower, more specific goals.
Here are a few examples for you to understand the concept of defining your goals better:
- Increased number of followers
- Improved engagement
- More sign-ups for newsletters
- Higher click-through-rates
Step 2: Using website analytics to measure social media impact.
Whether you’re a consultancy, an e-commerce store, or a non-profit organization, your primary online presence has to be your business website. This is where the true business takes place, after all.
Therefore, driving organic website traffic has to be a major goal of your social media marketing efforts. This is one thing that is easily measurable through tools like Google Analytics. This free tool has a separate section for visitors arriving from social media sites.
Learning these insights will also help you compare the overall website traffic with that generated by social media, giving you a good idea of how well your marketing efforts are performing.
Step 3: Tracking the social media metrics closely. 100
Just like Google Analytics, each social media platform has its own dedicated analytics tool that you can use to measure the effectiveness of your social media activities. These tools focus on several KPIs; we’re mentioning the ones you should pay close attention to below:
Reach and impression:
These metrics focus on how many new visitors have discovered the content you post on social media.
Engagement metrics:
While discovering your content might be the first step, engagement in it decides whether your efforts are working or not.
Wondering why? Well, because social media users will only engage with content when they like it.
The major engagement metrics include likes, comments, saves, and shares.
Audience demographics:
Another interesting insight that social media analytics tools can help you with is the knowledge of audience.
It categorizes them based on their location, gender, age, and interests, thereby helping you gain a deeper understanding of the crowd your business attracts.
You can also use these insights to make changes in your content strategy to attract more of the desired demographic.
Bonus: If you’re into running influencer marketing campaigns on the social handles of your business, it’d be super helpful to monitor the influencer metrics as well.
Your Journey to Becoming a Certified Social Media Marketer starts here!
We hope the process we mentioned above can help all social media marketers overcome the challenge of calculating the ROI of their efforts.
That being said, we also hope we were able to ignite the interest of our fresher readers in the field of social media marketing. After all, many businesses claim it to be at the core of all digital marketing today.
Becoming a social media marketer might not necessarily need any specific degree at this point, but the certification course we offer for it at Future Labs Technology will certainly level up your game.
It has helped many of our students land jobs and freelancing gigs within a month and might do the same for you. Check out the course details here!