How To Measure ROI With Social Media
Many business fail to use social media because they can’t effectively measure their return on investment (ROI.) These are basically the “old media” types, the guys that want stacks of reports and 50 lawyers looking over social media site. Well, old media, you’ll never get a return on your social media investment if you go about it that way.
First, these social media sites are free. Secondly, you are already paying your employees to work for you. Finally, if you can’t afford to have a few people run your social media sites for you…well, your competition already has a jump on you.
Not too long ago, I was listening to a webinar with Social Media Coach Chris Brogan. One of the things he said about measuring ROI in a social media campaign was to simply measure if sales are up or are they down. That’s simple enough.
Mashable came out with a great article about measuring ROI.
Last month, we reported on a survey that found that 84% of social media programs don’t measure return on investment (ROI). The comments in that post indicated that a lot of individuals and businesses want to be able to measure the ROI of their social media strategies and campaigns, but they don’t know where to start.
There are ways to measure measure ROI in social media for old media types. Some of these would include:
Google Analytics — It’s free and it can provide a really powerful baseline for a variety of different factors. You can track incoming links and then the activities of the users they send, which can be helpful.
Omniture — Omniture has a slew of services available for businesses, including components that track Facebook and Twitter metrics.
TweetMeme Analytics — This is useful if you use TweetMeme’s retweet buttons on your sites. It’s a lot like Google Analytics, but focused on TweetMeme.
PostRank Analytics — This suite of tools measures social engagement on other platforms and services. What’s nice about PostRank is that instead of just a raw number, you can actually see the messages and comments from other sites that contribute to your stats. This can be really important for sentiment analysis (more on that later).
HootSuite — HootSuite is a great Twitter manager but also offers impressive analytics. The nice thing about the click data you get from an app like HootSuite (or bit.ly) is by looking deeper you can more easily see if those clicks translate into transactions or impressions on your other sites.
Viral Heat — Viral Heat is an affordable social media monitoring service that includes a sentiment breakdown for Twitter mentions.
Twendz — Twendz is a very basic real-time Twitter sentiments tool.
Tweet Feel — Tweet Feel is another real-time Twitter sentiments search-engine.
Crimson Hexagon — Crimson Hexagon is an Enterprise-level social media tracking tool. The algorithm they use for their VoxTrot Opinion Monitor is really impressive stuff, and will help you determine what consumer sentiment is toward your brand based on social media mentions.
Sentiment Metrics — Sentiment Metrics is another tool aimed at enterprises or larger businesses.
Vitrue SRM —Vitrue does analytics for links posted on Twitter or Facebook and can also plug into third-party services like Omniture and Google Analytics. Vitrue SRM is basically a CMS for controlling and monitoring your Twitter and Facebook accounts.
ContextOptional — ContextOptional offers both a Social Reporting Dashboard for monitoring engagement and activity and a Social Moderation Console for Facebook.
Salesforce.com — Salesforce.com’s Service Cloud 2 line of products is really designed to integrate Twitter and Facebook results and pages directly into a company’s CRM. Although this isn’t ROI in the most clear-cut terms, by improving customer service and getting a handle on problems quickly, brands can save themselves from potentially costly mistakes. Those savings can be taken into account when computing your ROI.
How do you think you can effectively measure ROI with social media. For me, it deals with some analytics and some link tracking along with some sales data. Like Chris Brogan said, are sales up, or are sales down.
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