There are many ways to measure social media ROI for your social media platforms.

Here’s the truth: We play the long game when it comes to measuring return on investment with social media. It takes countless mini steps to get to the results you’re aiming for. Not everything you do on social media will translate directly into dollars and cents. Yet, every business knows that they’re accountable for the time, talent and resources that go into their social media efforts.

What does ROI mean? Return on investment (ROI) is an approximate measure of an investment’s profitability.

Given this formula, if I invest $1000 in a Google ad and I earn $11,400 in revenues, what is my ROI? ROI = $6,400 divided by $1000 x 100% = 6.4%

Effectiveness is measured by how well your marketing strategy increases your revenue while decreasing the cost of customer acquisition.

Paid campaigns are “easier” to calculate ROI. For instance, Facebook provides a “Pixel” which gathers data and insights on your target market, traffic, attribution, and conversion data for paid ads. Google Analytics offers a Google Analytics code that also gathers data and insights on your target market and your campaign results. However, even with paid social, it can be difficult to measure the value your paid ads are returning.

As an example: If the goal of a paid campaign on social is to increase brand awareness and influence, ROI could be measured by growth in follower count or impressions, reach, or shares.

Now how do you measure non-ROI metrics if you don’t use paid marketing campaigns? It’s a challenging task to quantify the ROI of organic social media since your overall strategy and content output isn’t tied directly to specific calls-to-action.

Here are some tactics you can employ to measure social media ROI for organic content:

• Rather than aiming simply for vanity metrics including likes, comments, shares or impressions, rather consider writing robust, relevant, entertaining, informative posts that are so compelling that they instantly garner attention from your fans and followers? Chasing vanity metrics may not help your platforms grow or result in those coveted conversions.
• Optimize your website to the max with SEO. Without SEO on every page and post on your website, you won’t be data-driven or invested in keyword research.
• Publish content when your audience is online and most likely to respond. You’re wasting your time and talent if you don’t post at these critical times.
• Determine the demographics of your target audience and speak to them!
• Add video tutorials—be sure they’re informative and go ahead and add some humor to them!
• Do you have blogs on your website? What? You don’t? Blog content is a game-changer and a topic for another day, but you need blogs on your site!
• Are you using Google Business Profile Manager? Start using it today! GBPM provides incredible accurate insights and is tied to search engine optimization. Do you want to grow your Google presence? Then, use Google Business Profile Manager!
• Offer special discounts via an email list sign-up or a pop-up on the home page of your website. Quantify how many people sign-up for your content.
• Offer trials of your product. Naturally, this tip isn’t for service-based businesses, but you could offer a free webinar or free consultations to potential clients, fans and followers. Trials can drive people to your door! A service business can offer downloads of a whitepaper, ebook or other helpful information.
• Go old-school and ask your customers how they found out about your business.
• More old-school: Motivate your customers to mention your discount or bring in an advertisement for your offer.
• Google offers a dedicated phone number you can use to track responses.

Whether you employ paid or organic social media marketing strategies, it’s important to quantify the information provided by the insights on all your platforms. If you’re achieving the results you want, great! If not, it’s time to use insights and pivot until you begin to see the target numbers you’re attempting to reach.

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