The ROI of Social Media: Measuring What Matters

Melonie Dodaro  •  Social Media Marketing

The ROI of Social Media: Measuring What Matters

Do you know what the return on investment (ROI) of your social media efforts is for your business?

Do you know which key performance indicators (KPIs) are most important to your business and how they are tied to your business goals?

Do you know where to find these metrics?

Do you have the tools to measure these metrics?

If you answered No to any of the questions above, chance are you are not using social media efficiently or effectively for your business.

Not only is the “spray and pray method” with social media not effective, but it can also cost you money and harm your brand image.

How can you effectively measure your social media efforts to (a) make sure they produce the results you want and (b) identify the specific activities producing the best results?

You start by identifying which of your business goals social media can help you achieve. These fall under two categories:

  1. sales goals
  2. branding goals

You can then use these two sets of goals to create useful KPIs to track the ROI of your social media.

The ROI of Social Media: How to Measure What Matters

Before we dig into which social media KPIs or metrics you should track to determine whether you are achieving your sales and branding goals, I want to make sure you understand what a KPI is.

KPIs are merely the results, or outcomes, you want to achieve from your social media efforts. If you put in consistent time and energy into your social media activities, I am confident you’d want to see some definable and measurable results.

Your ultimate success requires that you answer these two fundamental questions:

  1. What are the outcomes I want from my social media efforts?
  2. Do I have access to the data reflecting those outcomes so I can measure success?

While there are many social media KPIs that can be tracked and measured, I will share a few that will provide you with insights into both the activities you are doing as well as the results from doing them.

Remember: You can’t improve what you don’t measure.

Define your business goals

Start by identifying your business goals. If you have a business plan, go through your goals and objectives, and determine which goals social media marketing can help you achieve. If you don’t have a business plan, think about what overall goals you would like to achieve for your business.

Examples of business goals that social media can help you achieve include:

  • increasing brand awareness
  • establishing your authority on your topic
  • building a loyal community
  • attracting more leads and prospects
  • building relationships with new customers
  • maintaining and improving relationships with existing customers
  • improving customer service
  • increasing revenue

Next, go through each business goal to determine whether it is a sales goal or a branding goal. For example, increasing brand awareness and establishing your authority on your topic are branding goals, while increasing revenue and attracting more leads and prospects are sales goals.

Some business goals can fall under both categories, such as improving customer service. This goal ensures a strong brand for your business as well as increased repeat business.

Once you have your list of goals, you need to determine what social media platforms your ideal clients or buyers are using. If a social media platform is not used by your ideal clients, it will not help you achieve your goals.

Once you know which platforms they are using, you need to determine how each platform can help you achieve each business goal. For example, if you are a B2B (business to business) business, you can likely find your ideal clients on LinkedIn. If one of your business goals is a sales goal to generate new leads each month, LinkedIn is an ideal platform to help you achieve this goal.

Go through each of your business goals, and determine which platform is best suited to help you achieve each.

Determine your metrics

Next, assign a KPI, or a metric, to measure to determine whether you are moving toward your goal. Some metrics are clearer and easier to define than others.

If, for example, your goal is to generate 10 new leads a month, you simply track the number of new leads you get each month.

A goal with a less obvious metric might be to increase brand awareness. In this case, if your ideal clients are on Facebook, you might look at metrics such as the number of likes your business page has or the views your posts are getting as well as metrics tied to any paid advertising you do on the platform.

Some of the sales metrics you can track include:

  • number of leads generated from social media activities
  • number of appointments booked
  • value of a sales pipeline from social media activities
  • contract value of deals made from social media activities
  • revenue generated from social media activities

Branding metrics, which are not revenue-focused but provide insights into your activities, include:

  • number of views from posts or shared content
  • engagement with shared content (likes, comments, shares, etc.)
  • visits to your website coming from social media
  • follower or network size (connections, followers, page likes)

It’s imperative to know the KPIs of social media that are most important to your business.

Create a social media strategy and action plan

Once you identify (a) your goals, (b) the platforms that will help you attain them and (c) the specific metrics you need to track, you need to create a social media strategy and action plan. This action plan needs to detail the activities to be done and the days you will do them on.

Here is a quick example. Let’s say you have identified the following goals:

  • generate 10 new leads per month
  • establish your authority as a subject matter expert

You know LinkedIn is the most effective platform for a B2B business, and, after some research, you have confirmed your ideal clients can be found there. The action plan you create to achieve those two goals might look something like this:

  • review Who’s Viewed Your Profile and Who’s Viewed Your Posts and Followers for prospects to connect with (daily)
  • find and connect with five new prospects using the Advanced Search (daily)
  • send follow up messages, thanking new connections for accepting your connection requests or connecting with you (daily)
  • reply to all messages received (daily)
  • build relationships with new prospects by staying in touch and providing value to them (daily)
  • post a status update that provides value to your ideal clients (daily)
  • send something of value to a hot prospect (weekly)

Be sure to include the frequency with which each task should be completed. It might be daily, weekly, monthly or any other frequency.

ADDITIONAL LEARNING: To learn more about how to create a LinkedIn lead generation action plan, check out my book LinkedIn Unlocked. You can get a digital copy here, or you can get it as a printed or audio book here.

Understand that there is no one-size-fits-all solution or system. Your social media strategy and action plan will vary depending on factors such as your:

  • goals
  • ideal clients
  • industry
  • budget
  • time and resources

Once you create your action plan, you need to implement it consistently to achieve the results you want.

As you go through the various activities each day, make a quick note of how long each action takes you. You might want to do this for a couple of weeks, especially if you are just starting. As you become more competent and confident in executing your action plan, many of the activities will take less time.

Notice which activities are taking most of your time and which can be done quickly. You can use this information, along with the KPIs or metrics you track, to help you modify your plan to ensure you are getting a measurable ROI on your social media efforts.

Measure your KPIs

Once you have your action plan in place, you need to track your activities and the outcomes they produce. Thankfully, many tools (free and paid) can help you track your KPIs.

An additional benefit of some of the tools that track your metrics is some also allow you to schedule posts to your special media platforms, which can help save you time and make you more efficient.

You can’t always be on social media, and with the help of these tools, you don’t have to be. In one place, you can pre-schedule posts, monitor your community’s engagement and read and respond to messages.

Some great tools, free or with affordable options, include:

A great (and free) tool to measure how much traffic your social media efforts are driving to your website is Google Analytics. You can also set up Google Alerts to track any mentions of your business or brand.

Find more great social media monitoring tools here.

As you collect your metrics, compare the results with your sales and branding goals to determine what’s working and what isn’t.

As you determine this, modify your action plan for each platform to improve your results. If a social media platform isn’t performing as you expected, don’t be afraid to change your activities or even leave the platform.

After you make changes, test them. Then test them again. It is vital to know what is or isn’t working.

Remember that it can easily take six months to a year to build a social media community large enough to provide viable results on any platform. If you are interested in achieving results more quickly, you can try paid social ads and/or a direct LinkedIn outreach strategy, mentioned above.

Know the ROI of social media for your business

Social media can be an incredible tool to help you achieve important outcomes for your business, such as:

  • establishing your authority on your topic
  • increasing brand awareness
  • increasing your sales and revenue.

But like with any tool, using it just because you think you should will probably not produce the results you want.

To be successful with social media, you need to understand how it can help you achieve the objectives most meaningful to your business. That means knowing and tracking the outcomes and KPIs that will help you define and maintain your success.

What KPIs or metrics are most important to you and your business when determining the ROI of social media? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Subscribe to 

— Our Newsletter

Get weekly update about our articles on your email, no spam guaranteed we promise!️