They say there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and that’s certainly true when it comes to marketing. However much you might prefer to get lost in the creative side, being able to measure your Return On Investment is critical to both hitting your marketing goals, and to showing your CEO that you deserve the budget that you spend.
Why should I be measuring social results?
Like it or not, Marketing is a game of numbers. We have to be able to show new leads, worthy MQLs, and revenue as a result of our activities. If we aren’t bringing the right kind of people to Sales, with enough awareness of the company’s product to have a serious buying conversation, we aren’t doing our jobs.
The other side of ROI is cost. Regardless of your company size, being active on social media has a monetary cost. If you’re a big enough outfit to have a dedicated Social Medi Manager, or even a team managing your accounts, you need to include their salary in any ROI calculations. If your team is small, and social media is part of one or several people’s jobs, you’ll need to grab a calculator and base this part of the calculation on how many hours a week is being spent on social. This includes either creating platform-specific content or adapting general content for the social feed, not just the process of posting.
Which metrics do I measure?
Which social media metrics to measure depends on what you’re trying to achieve. If you’re focused on Demand Generation, then Conversions will tell you that you’re reaching people who have the problem you solve. If share of voice is your target, then aim for ReTweets/Shares, as well as mentions.
How do I measure them?
Any metric that is native to the platform (Likes, Shares, Comments etc.) are straightforward to manage. For anything else, you’re going to need a social media management platform.
Accurately measuring Conversions, which is our team’s key social metric, relies on UTMs. These are add-ons which make the URL in a post unique, without you having to set up multiple versions of the actual page. We use them so heavily that we created our own tool to quickly generate them. This will allow you to see which form fills on a page came directly from a social post. We recommend something like this:
Ready to start proving your worth?
GatorSocial offers a range of dashboards for measuring whichever social media metric is the key to success for your team. You also have the ability to build your own dashboards and customise the reports.
Want to see it in action? Get started with a demo here.