How to Measure Social Media ROI – It can be a mission
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These days i have been a bit out of action as i have thinking on how to measure return on investment within the social media realm. Or should I say The Return on Ignorance (ROI). Sorry that’s me just thinking out loud. It’s a mission as its not that straight forward. Many CRM applications are working to bridge this gap but in the mean time how to you measure returns. I actually feel bad for corporates who have a legacy based CRM application because they have a challenge now in front of them to measure their marketing social media efforts.
Well instead of focusing on the negatives may be these few tips could get you on your way to taking a more holistic approach to social media
Have a clear objective
Image Credits: birgerking
Once you have defined your goals the next step is to have the right tools in place to monitor your goals. The trick here is not to solely rely on numbers and have dozens of tools but to take a more minimalistic approach to getting started the right way:
The First step:
Before diving into how to measure your blog or website performance or social media profiles, you need to have the ability to create virtual pages or 301 redirect pages. These are “vanity” urls that you create that redirects to the mail tracking URL. If this is confusing please ask your IT team to have this setup for you.
The second step:
An Analytical tool:
This is now become the basic tool you need for your website to be monitored.
Now don’t just feel wow about an increase in traffic. Instead drill down and analyze:
Tools you could start of with are
Google Analytics: This is a free tool used widely even in large corporates to monitor their traffic.
Post Rank Analytics: This is an nifty tool as they have pretty much combined Google Analytics With Social Media Statistics there by allowing you to drill down on who is sharing your content whether some of your blog posts are going viral, etc
Viral heat: These guys have created a most simplistic approach of how to measure social media engagement. They don’t just focus on monitoring instead gather all the mentions about you and display the information in a more easy to use manner.
Hoote Suite: As mentioned in my ebook “The Art of Social media the Minimalist Way” this is a great tool to manage multiple social profiles and acts as your social media dashboard.
Once you have the tools to measure your returns the next question that springs to mind is what do you measure:
Reach: Once you have a social media strategy in place the initial phase to measure reach could be:
Discussions: Measure the discussions that are happening around your social profiles.
Outcomes: Then you want to measure what is the outcome of your efforts
All these can be achieved by using the tools mentioned above.
To learn more about how to engage your audience you could read my previous post
Ways to beat your competition using social media channels – just be different
Other areas to monitor
I hope this gives you a starting point to measure your ROI with in the social media space.
Do let me know either via email or through comments on whether I need to expand this post further to dig deeper into this topic
Have an awesome week ahead !!!!
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October 4th, 2010 at 1:25 pm
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