Social media ROI is a topic that is ardently debated because measuring its effectiveness is not clear-cut compared to other campaigns like AdWords and SEO. It’s quite difficult to determine the revenue a business has generated from Tweets it sent out. Nonetheless, measuring the effectiveness of a social media campaign isn’t beyond your reach. A big mistake that companies make is to be tied up with things like the volume or number of Likes on Facebook or followers on Twitter. It makes no sense to have a Tweet that is retweeted 1000 times if it doesn’t help in realizing your social media goals.
Best network to track ROI
While measuring ROI in social media platforms has been a daunting task for business owners and marketers, there are networks that have provided tools to allow for easy tracking. Twitter introduced its Analytics, which provides details about tweet’s clicks, engagement, retweets, and favorites or mentions.
Facebook uses its built-in analytics called Facebook Insights, which gives you information about when you need to post. It also allows you to know what kind of content engages followers the most. You can also keep track of the Likes a page receives.
Pinterest has its tracking feature known as Pinterest Analytics that allows you to know what people like within your profile. Using Pinterest Analytics helps you determine the repins, impressions, likes, and clicks received on each pin.
Do campaigns work?
Social media marketing campaigns do work; however, it depends on the goal of the business in using a particular social network. In the past, social media has been used to engage and interact with audiences. It has been an important branding feature helping businesses create brand name awareness and reputation.
However, today, it is not uncommon to see businesses trying to convert leads to customers right from a social media page. Lately, you may have seen that businesses are integrating ‘buy buttons’ within their social media pages.
How often do you need to post on your business page?
Social media can deliver results when you know when to post your content. Depending on each social medial network, a business may need to have different approaches in posting on its pages. In order to get the most mileage from posting in social media pages, a business may want to post three times or so a day in Twitter. However, engagement is likely to drop to some extent after the third tweet.
In Facebook, it is more effective to share two times in a day just before comments and Likes begin to drop. In LinkedIn, posting one time in a week will allow you to reach almost 60 percent of audiences. When you want to share on Google+, do it three times in a day, but the more often you post, the more activity you are likely to get.
Pinterest requires you to post five times a day. In Instagram, it may only require you to post one and half times in day, however, you can do more because there seems to be no drop off in engagement even when you post more.
In order to measure social media ROI, you need to track the relevant metrics. There are different social metrics ranging from retweets, mentions, likes and favorites, through comments to shares. Each of these metrics may indicate different aspects about the audiences. For example, mentions on Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Instagram allow you to build your brand awareness and the social media profiles. This can directly impact the growth rate of followers.
Source: http://www.williammarketing.com/blog-post/tracking-your-roi-through-social-media/