The ROI of your Facebook post is a little more than the amount of people it reached. Sure, we all want our posts to go viral and that’s what we should strive to do as we are writing and planning out our content. But, let’s be realistic; every post that we write is not going to go through the roof and be seen by millions of people. So how should you measure the success of a post? Engagement is the key that unlocks the door to success. Are users liking? Commenting? Sharing? Clicking the links on your post? Or even viewing the photo itself? All of these things are the pieces to the puzzle needed to measure your ROI on each post.
Checking your social analytics is crucial to your social media marketing strategy. When reporting your analytics make sure you are consistent. Are you checking them every week? Every other week? Or every month? Whatever you are doing, just keep doing it. Consistency is also key because if you are not consistent with your analytics reports it is going to be very hard to compare this month's success to last month’s if you have pulled the reports at a different time.
Check your referral traffic! Referral traffic is a great way to measure your ROI. Logging into your Google Analytics account and checking how many sessions your website received from your various social channels is a great way to see what is working. You may see that Facebook is your number one social channel for referral traffic and Twitter is lagging. This information may cause you to either focus more time on Facebook because that is where your audience is, or you may decide that you want to grow your Twitter account so you focus more time on tweeting and engaging. Either way, your social referral traffic is a great way to measure your social success. An important thing to remember is that Instagram referral traffic cannot be tracked at this time.
You are able to track your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest analytics within their respective sites. At this time there is no way to track Instagram analytics within Instagram other than measuring what content is converting, what time is best for posting, and how many likes and comments you receive on each post. Making sure your content is converting is the biggest way to measure your ROI. Are your social media fans heading back to your website? If you answer no then you need to reevaluate:
- The content you are sending out. Are you being helpful?
- The time it’s going out.
- How many times a day you are posting.
- Are you engaging with your followers?
Remember, real ROI is a return on influence! Are you building relationships with people that matter to your business? Is your social media enhancing your customer service and operations? Clicks, likes, engagement and so on are all great and should be measured but the real measurement is the relationship you are building with your community and clients. ROI = return on influence.
If you are looking for tools to help with your social media tracking some good tools are Sprout Social, Hootsuite, HubSpot, Post Planner, and so many others. You just need to find the tool that works for you and your company’s needs. Happy social tracking!
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