Do you track your social media marketing results? If not, how do you know if your efforts are paying off? When it comes to tracking and reporting social media metrics, it’s not necessarily traditional ROI (return on investment) that you’ll be looking at. That’s not to say that you can’t track web sales or signing on a new client and then tie it back to social media marketing and therefore determining the financial impact, but with many social media metrics, it may be harder to clearly assign a dollar value.
Return on expectations and return on effort are often easier to track and calculate. First, you will need to develop a social media strategy that outlines your baselines and goals. Baselines provide a current state for the metrics you plan to track and report on. Your goals give you a desired target or outcome for your efforts – what needles do you want to see moving as a result of engaging in social media marketing?
In the two years I have been actively utilizing social media marketing, I have yet to see agreement on how to define the metrics often discussed with social media – reach and influence. Therefore, a good place to start is by defining your own key metrics in a way that makes sense for your business. For example, what data will you pull to calculate your “reach”? To help you decide, to do a little research on the values suggested by other social media experts and then select the ones that are most applicable to your business – it isn’t an exact science just yet.
If you plan to calculate ROI, then you will also want to assign dollar values to the effort behind your social media marketing activities. For example, how much is your time worth? Did you make any financial investments to create your social media profiles? How much is a new client worth?
So now that you have a plan, definitions and targets, what do you do with the data? That’s the question I asked myself about a year ago. My solution was to create a simple worksheet that tracks not only my baselines, targets and definitions, but also provides a place to input monthly results for all my social media activity – complete with calculations to show month over month change. The workbook was great for seeing trends, but I needed to tie the data back to the social media metrics that I had decided to report on. My next step was to develop a dashboard that pulls the raw data and calculates the results of the social media metrics I was tracking.
Remember that in social media, metrics are often intangible. That does not mean the data is not meaningful. The expectations you set and the outcomes you see will be a direct result of your efforts, telling a powerful story. And with social media, you can easily make adjustments and corrections to see how changes impact your results. Just beware that some social media metrics can take three or more months before data starts to flow. For example, for a new Facebook business page, until you have a significant number of targeted followers and consistent sharing of valuable information, the engagement on that page may be low. Makes sense though, right?
You can find the practical tools I use to manage my social media campaigns along with the workbook I developed for tracking and tying results at SocialMediaSavvyVA.com.
