How to Really Identify Your Brand’s Social ROI [Infographic]

As a digital marketer, you’re most likely spending a significant amount of time on your brand’s social media presence and following.

This is especially true if you’re responding to questions and comments in real time, posting photos and live videos, or sharing new content to your audience (which you should).

But let me ask you -- do you know if you’re actually gaining anything from your social media efforts?

Unfortunately, you could be spending a considerable amount of time and money without breaking even if you’re not careful. While social posts are great for generating likes and comments, sometimes, it’s hard to distinguish if your efforts have an impact on your business goals.

In this infographic from MDG Advertising, we’ll look at some of the trends and challenges brands face while trying to measure ROI and hopefully, help you change that!

The Biggest Challenges with Social ROI

When it comes to social media marketers typically face these four challenges:

1. Proving social media’s impact on your company’s revenue.
2. Being able to frequently publish compelling content.
3. Defining a social strategy that allows you to effectively target your audience on each platform you publish on.
4. Identifying how social media fits into the bigger picture and aligning it with business goals.

If you’re struggling with number 1, seeing a return on social media, you’re not alone.

44% of CMOs admit they have not been able to measure the impact that social media has had on their business. (Though this B2B method can be quite helpful.)

While brands are trying to measure this and other points, most of the analytics are limited to likes, shares, and views.

On many platforms, there aren’t a lot of metrics that allow marketers to attribute downloads, requests, and sales to social media -- especially if you’re only pulling metrics directly from the social platforms themselves.

Why Marketers Find it Difficult to Measure Social ROI

According to MDG Advertising, one of the biggest reasons marketers find social difficult to measure is because they aren’t incorporating additional social tracking tools.

Unfortunately, the clicks, likes, and shares many platforms show you are just a piece of the puzzle. You need to incorporate measurement tools like Google Analytics, Buzzsumo, Snaplytics, or Sprout Social to see the bigger picture.

How Marketers Are Measuring Social ROI

When it comes to social media, it’s important to identify your overall objective before looking at ROI.

Are you using social media to generate more website traffic? Generate leads? Expand your audience and reach? Generate sales?

Based on your objective, you’ll then be able to better determine which social media metrics you should be looking at.

Considering your goals might also consider implementing paid social. In this case, there are other metrics you should actively be monitoring such as audience reach and growth, clicks to your site, engagement, as well as the overall conversion rate.

While you might want to know how many likes and shares a post has, marketers also need to find meaningful data that actually reveals the effectiveness of social media.

Some metrics you should consider include:

• Traffic to your website
• Leads
• Customers
• Impressions
• Number of followers
• Brand mentions

You might not need to track all of the metrics mentioned above. You should be tracking those that are relevant to your social / business objectives.

It’s also important to make sure your reporting is consistent and that you’re using the data you gathered to tweak your social strategy to improve your metrics and capture the right audience.

Want to learn more about tracking your social performance? Check out the full infographic below and let me know if there are other metrics you’re actively tracking to determine social ROI.