Social Media is going crazy viral as each day passes. Nowadays, it seems that everybody and their mothers use different social networking sites for a variety of purposes. In a show of entrepreneurial spirit, small businesses everywhere started to get on this marketing technique and follow it with such gusto that every article seems to focus on this strategy.
The measurement of your return of investments is important because it gives you an understanding of how effective a particular marketing campaign is. Sadly, 84% of those using social media do not measure ROI.
There are various tools which you can use to measure social media ROI. Here are a few that are beneficial for small businesses:
- Addictomatic – this is a news aggregator but can also be used to monitor social media. You just need to put in the name of a topic (i.e: name or category of your business) and you’ll receive the latest feeds about that certain topic.
- Analytic.ly – this tool gives you a customized report on your targeted audience depending on your campaign platform. You can create a customized analytics platform and search keywords and @names for a price. As of press time, the Social Media Command Center and Viral Analytics is priced at $9 a month
- Backtype – Just type in the url of your website or really any url from your internet marketing efforts and you’ll receive real-time information of the social impact of those sites. You would also be provided a score of your social influence and how much you rank as an influencer.
- Grader – this is a cornucopia of tools which helps measure and analyzes how effective are the marketing strategies you use for your business.
- Google Feedburner – this is a free tool from where you can burn feeds from your sites and you would be able to track how many subscribers you have, check how many views and clicks are generated from your sites and even track your podcast downloads.
- Social Networking Media ROI Calculator – this is a free online tool from DragonSearch which calculates all your social media efforts and its relation to how much you are spending on networking sites.
- Twitalyzer – this tool starts with a free trial but you would need to subscribe to get automatic updates, full data export, email support and other services. The price for subscription depends on whether you are using the tool as an individual, business or agency. Basically, this tool informs you of your impact score or your percentile rank, which kind of influencer you are, your location, among others.
There are numerous ways you can measure the impact your social marketing efforts have on your business. However, you should not stop there. Analyzing the metrics is just a part of the bigger picture. You would need to incorporate the metrics you got from the monitoring tools you use and see how they affect sales and customer retention and other output goal markers you have.
ROI is a financial formula. Social Media ROI is not a measurement on the number of followers or clicks. Instead, Social Media ROI is the relationship between your social media campaign’s return and investment, as measured in dollars.
We have developed a Social Media ROI application that delivers the return in dollars and the ROI as a percentage using the financial ROI formula. As it should be. 🙂
Thanks for the tips Amanda. I’ve used a few of these, but there are a few I’ve never heard of. Feedburner is one of my faves.
With all that we do on line it is important that a service or product is delivered to a customer. Then the Social media ROI can be measured or estimated as a liker/follower to customer ratio. The social influence of a follower who has “celebrity power” can boost the $ ROI or lower it as they post comments in their networks.
Keep them happy!
Kern
This list is almost useless. None of these tools can accomplish more than one thing at a time. This almost seems like an attempt to confuse businesses so they spend money on SEO firms. Maybe I am cynical.
The point of the article is 1 out of 5 people measure the results in terms of dollars and cents from their marketing efforts in the realm of social media. Since marketing is about attracting and attention and then building a relationship, all marketing activities are essentially about relationships. Social media is just one marketing vehicle to secure sales leads. HubSpot has measured the cost of inbound leads versus outbound leads. To ignore the ROI of any marketing effort is just plain foolish. As it has been said, if you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it. Good article, thanks for sharing the tools. Leanne Hoagland-Smith, author of Be the Red Jacket in a sea of Gray Suits
Really interesting article,
Measuring ROI on a brand enhancement campaign through Twitter or Facebook could prove a waste of resources. Simply creating the best quality and most frequent new and interesting social media content is a superb way to spend your time and resources. I got some statistics from a report by Econsultancy that are very interesting.
– According to just under three-quarters of agencies surveyed (74%), clients use direct traffic to measure social media activity.
This is clearly a narrow minded view of measuring the effectiveness, or ROI, on a social media campaign!
Here are some other interesting statistics on corporate participation in social media strategy
– A third of companies (32%) do not spend anything on social media marketing and a further 36% spend under $5,000 a year.
I hope this has given a different slant to your point on Social media and ROI! I would finish by saying that ROI on social media is a fledgling concept with difficult parameters to measure. However I think that soon there will be full and accurate measurements of ROI on social media. In the meanwhile keep your content RELEVANT, REFRESHING and INTERESTING!
All statistics taken from Econsultancy’s “Value of social media” Report: http://ecly.co/9XJLkk
Amanda:
Great information. Do you know of anyone in the Dallas-Fort Worth, TX area that speaks on this topic?
Thank you!
Social Media is certainly going to stay because of it’s multiple benefits. Businesses will have to come up with new and innovative tools if they want to grow and survive in this highly competitive age.
merchant services
http://www.occent.com