How to measure your investment in social media?

The power generated by social networks according to commercial purposes , has a very broad and effective spectrum, as long as digital marketing experts know how to use this type of media correctly.

An imperative element for marketing departments, and that defines the success of a marketing campaign, is the return on investment (ROI, English “Return On Investment”). Because if a company is investing money doing social media campaigns , it is important to determine the return on those investments.

According to a study by the company Brandwatch, it is relevant for social media strategies to calculate ROI to determine if a campaign has a good impact. However, some of the executives don’t know how to do it. In addition, the Domo company highlights that currently only three out of four marketing experts do not know how to measure ROI on these platforms.

Main metrics to measure ROI

1 reach

The scope refers to the number of followers on Twitter, fans on Facebook or contacts on LinkedIn , to name examples. The greater your reach, the greater the number of people who will see your content and share your messages, as a result, you can increase your ROI.

In this way, the specialist or person in charge of these digital activities must monitor the extension of its scope in a certain time. If you are not attracting new members or followers, you should focus on generating more people in your communities and increasing your reach to increase the value you get from social media marketing.

2. Sales opportunities

HubSpot makes special reference that this is one of the most important metrics when measuring the ROI of social media campaigns. The executive or community manager should carefully observe the traffic that is being generated from these platforms and based on this, should analyze how many of those visitors to the website or blog have become sales opportunities.

3. Traffic

One of the main objectives in social media strategies is to establish the generation of traffic from these platforms to the website, the company blog or the brand. Social media executives need to analyze your blog and web portal referral sources to determine how many new visitors are coming from your social media, and you will need to monitor this number over time.

4. Conversion rate

From the registered traffic of social networks, it must be determined what percentage of those visitors become sales opportunities. According to HubSpot, the conversion rate can be very useful if you compare one channel with another. For example, the social media expert can compare his conversion rate from social networks to that of blog posts, in order to analyze the ROI of each of those channels.

5. Generation of clients

Finally, the source indicates that the ability to determine real customers can be an excellent indicator of the time spent on social media marketing and if it is paying off. That is why executives should at this point ask themselves, have my social media sales opportunities turned into customers? And if so, they should analyze the number of new contacts.