How to Prove ROI from your Social Media Marketing

Feb 3, 2022

Whether you run your own business, or you’re reporting on social media activity to a wider team, proving the ROI of your social media marketing is essential. Better measurement of your social media marketing will prove how your efforts are helping to achieve broader business objectives and will enable more informed decision making.

The pandemic put social media forward as a core channel for businesses to communicate with customers, manage service requests and make sales – and it has proved its value for many as an essential business tool.

Your Strategy

Before you can create effective social media content, you need to create a detailed social media strategy.

Answer the following questions:

What are your social media objectives?
What does success look like?
Who are you trying to reach?

Your answers will help focus your efforts on what’s most important, or what you want your “return” to be. This could be reach, website visitors, sales, followers, reach, engagement, downloads… etc.

A key part of any social media strategy is also assessing what you have available to invest. This is often overlooked! Your time, content creation, advertising spend, outsourced support, social media tools are all examples of “investments” that you will likely make in your social media marketing.

Social Media Tracking Tools

There is a wide range of tools available for you to track your key social media metrics. The tools available can range from free to enormously expensive!

First, make a list of the metrics that matter. Then figure out how to track them.

Reach (Brand awareness)
Impressions
Social media followers/fans
Profile/Page visits
Total engagements (Likes, comments, shares)
Video views
Link clicks (e.g. CTA button, Linktree, Bitly)
Website traffic
Website traffic from social media
Conversions (Sales, downloads, applications)
Share of voice
Sentiment
Conversational trends

Proving ROI

Effectively measuring your social media marketing will help you to improve your campaigns, unlock budget and learn what works.

It’s much easier to track ‘conversions’ when calculating ROI – sales, email subscribers, downloads, applications, contact form submissions, donations etc.

In order to figure out whether you’re getting a positive or negative ROI for social media campaigns, you’ll also have to measure how much you’re spending.

This could be advertising budget, content creation costs, social media tools including scheduling and listening dashboards, and your TIME!

You need to assign a value to your conversions if you don’t have one already. For example –

A download is worth £1
A new email subscriber is worth £2
A contact form submission is worth £10

By assigning values to each conversion you can review your key metrics and create a Conversions Total.

Then calculate ROI:

(Conversions Total / Total Investments) x 100 = ROI

This will present your ROI as a percentage of your investment. So if your conversions were £10,000 in a particular month and your total investments were £5,000 then your ROI would be 200%.

Building a Social Media Report

It’s best practice to create a social media report which you can fill out every month. This will enable you to keep track of growth and spot any patterns in your social media.

Use this information to assess what works well and what doesn’t.

You should typically include:

Reach
Community size
Page/Profile visits
Number of posts
Total engagement
Website visitors from social media
Conversions
Best performing posts

Don’t forget to include a monthly commentary to tell the story of what’s happened in social media – and why!

Optimise your Social Media

Where are you seeing the most engagement, and which posts have performed best?
Are there any hashtags or location tags that have driven results?
What about themes of content?
How many posts have you published this month?
How many customer service enquiries are you getting per month, and are there any common FAQs?
What kind of audiences are you attracting and engaging with?
What is taking the most time and effort?

Make sure you give yourself time each month to properly review your social media, otherwise you will never truly understand how it performs for your business and the steps you need to take to continually improve it!

This blog was written following our How to Prove ROI from your Social Media Marketing broadcast on 27^th January 2022. Avocado Social members can (re)watch the entire broadcast in The Avocado Social Clubhouse.