Source: Awareness
Social Media Marketing has become an integral part of many companies marketing strategies. But many of these companies are struggling to define clear objectives for their social activity and how to measure success appropriately. The ever-changing social media landscape has made the measuring of social marketing even more challenging. Two years ago, when we first started Hashmeta, everyone was talking about the importance of being active on Facebook and Twitter and now the conversation has changed – Instagram is a marketer’s best friend.
No matter how the social media scenes have hanged, one of the most fundamental questions we should ask ourselves is what’s the ROI after all and how do you know that your social media marketing efforts are successful?
Before we dig into the all the different measuring metrics, it’s important to nail down your business goals. This is to make sure that we are measuring things that are inline with your company’s overall objectives. What are you hoping to get out of social media marketing?
By and large, these are the common objective most marketers are focusing:
Marketing Objectives & Metrics
Benefits of Social Media Marketing according to Social Media Industry Report from Social Media Examiner
- Increase Exposure
Metrics: Reach, Impression, View
- Increase Traffic
Metrics: Pageviews, Unique Visitor, length of visits - Increase Engagement
Metrics: Likes, Shares, Comments, Pins, +1, Retweets, Favourites - Garner Marketplace Insight
Metrics: Survey Entries, Comments - Develop Loyal Fans
Metrics: Fans, Followers - Generate Leads
Metrics: Hard lead, Soft Lead - Grow Business Partnership
Metrics: Contacts - Improve Sales
Metrics: Orders, New Customer, Sales Revenue
To streamline the metrics, Social media and Content Strategy Consultant @Jay Baer shared on SlideShare that there are four main types of metrics that help marketers like you to understand how your social media and content marketing impacts your business
Consumption metrics: How many people viewed, downloaded, or listened to this content?
Pageviews, Video views & Downloads
Sharing metrics: How resonant is this content, and how often is it shared with others?
Likes, Shares, Tweets,+1, Pins & Inbound Links
Lead-gen metrics: How often does content consumption result in a lead?
Form completions & downloads, Email Subscription, Blog Comments, Conversion Rate
Sales metrics: Did we actually make any money from this content?
Online Sales & Offline Sales
Here’s an illustration from @stephpchang Moz on how to use these metrics through the sales funnel.
Alternatively, you can measure based on the cost breakdown to gauge the ROI through the sales funnel:
- Cost per impression
- Cost per click
- Cost per engagement
- Cost per lead
- Cost per sale
What do you think? Does your business measure your social media marketing ROI? Which metrics are most important to your social media strategy? Leave your comments in the box below.