Before you jump straight into measuring metrics, it’s important to understand what you’re measuring and why you are doing it. Without getting a proper grasp of what this data could mean, you might as well be plucking numbers from thin air. First of all, let’s take a look at the 3 major reasons why you should be measuring your social media ROI:
- It will show you where you can make improvements in your campaigns
- It will allow you to see what channels are making the most impact, and where you should focus your social spend
- It will show you what impact changes to your campaigns actually make
These are all pretty straightforward. They will give you key insights into what you’re doing, what it’s achieving and how to make it better. And whilst you’re probably glancing at your increase in weekly followers, it’s unlikely that you’re actually drilling down into the data properly to see what impact it’s actually having on a business level.
So now you know why you’re measuring your social media ROI, but where do you start?
Understand Your Goals
This is the absolute, must-have basis for ANY digital marketing strategy! If you don’t have well defined goals, you might as well just pack it in now, because otherwise what are you doing here? You’re stabbing at the internet blind and hoping that something will come of it. It’s the equivalent of throwing a rock into the ocean, hoping it will hit a fish, that that fish will wash up to shore and somehow barbecue itself.
Setting the goals will depend entirely on your business strategy and what it is your company does, so I can’t just tell you what your goals should be, but here are some examples of common goals that clients of ours have used:
- Sales (this is the biggy, obviously)
- Leads generated – this can be calls to your company, contact form submissions, mailing list sign-ups
- Trials started
- Downloads of software or documents
Importantly, you should notice that all of these goals can have very simple numbers applied to them.
We had 42 trials started in the last week, and 142 mailing list sign-ups.
– Some business owner.
In fact, unless your business is very one-track-minded and focuses solely on getting people to trial software, chances are your social media goals are going to be a combination of all of the above. Though don’t let this stress you out, this is good. It means that you can look at success from many angles, and combine all of this data to have an overarching view too.
If you noticed, these goals basically follow the buying cycle for eCommerce websites. Click here for more on that. 
What I mean by this is that your goals should be measured from generating a customer’s initial awareness of your company to the final sale. Of course, we want to retain customers and get them coming back too, but let’s leave that for now.
Goals to Campaigns
Once you have your goals set up, and have decided what data points they will be defined by, you need to create a campaign that matches up to this specific goal. If you are looking to increase awareness of your brand, for instance, you want to create a campaign that approaches people who aren’t already your followers. If it’s trial sign-ups, remarketing to website visitors offering a ‘temporary free trial’ might be the way to go.
What campaigns you set up will be down to you, and we’re not going to go into depth on that here. But one thing you need to be sure you’re doing is tracking each campaign individually. This can be done by creating custom URLs with UTM parameters. Without going into too much detail, these are little appendages to the URL which allow you to track certain information, such as where the click came from and what campaign it was as a result of.
Here is an example of them in action:
http://example.com?utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=NewProductRange&utm_content=NewProd1
For more information on UTM parameters, check out blog here. This can be a complicated process and you may want to read up on using Google Auto-Tagging instead to achieve this.
What Are Social Media Metrics?
Social Media metrics are bits of data that show how social media impacts a company’s revenue. They take into consideration social media activity, the time, money and resources spent on this activity, and drill down into how this has effected key actions such as sales, leads generated or downloads.
These metrics come together to produce what is known as Return on Investment (ROI). All social media ROIs should be measured in currency units and should show; how much money goes into social media marketing, and how much money comes back out.
Metrics for social media can be as complicated and varied as your imagination permits, and will be more of less important based on what your business does and its objectives. In this guide to measuring social media metrics, we are going to outline the most common metrics that a company will use. And get you monitoring them in order to understand and improve upon your social campaigns. We will then show you how to combine this to understand your ROI.