How to Calculate Social Media Marketing ROI for Your Small Business Bplans Blog

Gone are the days where social media marketing was merely an experimental marketing tactic.It has become a core part of any businesss marketing strategy, and it needs to support your business goals, and prove its value in comparison to other channels for resources, budget, and executive buy-in.If youre struggling to measure ROI for social media, youre not alone.

Over 60 percent of marketers identify measuring ROI as one of their top social media marketing challenges.Theres a tremendous amount of work that must go into social media marketing for it to be effective and its often underestimated by business leaders. Financial investments are precious to startups and small businesses, so its extremely critical that social media marketing efforts can be validated as to how theyre contributing to the businesss goals.

Sure, a financial return is a priority, but never forget that you first need a solid foundation to build your marketing efforts on. You must invest in the resources, tools, and technologies to measure and track your social media ROI. This will allow for you to allocate more resources toward what is working, and improve what is not.

The ability to take such a proactive approach to ensure that paid efforts are as effective as possible is an enormous value-add to modern day businesses.Here are several strategies you can do to easily track social media marketing ROI for your business.Identify your business goalsWe can practically hear the collective duhs through the interwebs.

While it may seem obvious, its a step thats often skipped by business owners and marketers alike as were scrambling to keep our content fresh.Despite our heroic intent, the lack of planning results in scattered messaging, inconsistent posting, and drumroll please a lack of reportable metrics!Were not here to talk about vanity metrics such as likes, retweets, shares, and so on.

Were talkin real goals that prove their value by supporting core business objectives. The most critical question to ask is: How are your social media marketing efforts supporting your business goals? Over 50 percent of marketers identify tying social media activities to business objectives as their second most challenging social media marketing task.

Could it be chalked up to a lack of clearly defined goals?Comb through your business goals one by one and identify opportunities for social media to support them. The answers you come up with will define how to use social, the type of content you need to create, how you distribute it, and the reporting metrics to measure success.

Next, create tangible goals. For example, say you need to increase the number of top-of-funnel leads for your B2B company. Consider developing an offer such as a whitepaper or an ebook, and create a campaign around it to incite email sign-ups.

Youll develop a beautiful landing page that begs for conversions, create ads tailored to your selected social channels, and continue to manage and optimize the campaign. Now, you have brand new contacts for your upcoming email marketing campaigns and can begin to move them down the sales funnel.Define your social media metricsUsing your business goals as a guideline, define the metrics youll be measuring and reporting.

There are several different metrics you can use to track your progress against such as:Reach: the number of people who have seen your social media postsSite traffic: the number of people whove visited your websiteLeads: the number of people who have filled out a form on your websiteSign-ups and conversions: the number of people whove joined your email list, or downloaded premium contentRevenue generation: the amount of sales generated from social media marketingBonus: Use S. M. A.

R. T goals to help you truly define how your social media metrics will support your bigger business goals. Theyll need to be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely.

See the S.M.A.

R.T goal framework to create yours.See Also: 4 Social Media Mistakes Your Business Should AvoidKnow the role and impact of each metricLets go through each metric and define when its a good idea to measure them.

EngagementIf one of your goals is to increase social media engagement, definitely keep track of the number of likes, shares, comments, and retweets.ReachIs one of your core business goals to increase visibility and brand awareness? Track the number of people you have reached in your target region.

Site trafficIf youre looking to increase the number of visitors to your website or remarket to visitors, measure the number of URL clicks and traffic from social media. LeadsGenerally speaking, youre going to want to track the number of organic and paid leads that come in through your website and be able to attribute their source.Sign-ups and conversionsIf building your list of qualified leads or emails is a part of your goals, youre going to need to track the number of sign-ups or conversions.

Revenue generationYoull need to see how many dollars were generated from your social marketing efforts. Its important to compare the spend versus sales to identify the cost-per-acquisition.Validate your ROIHooray!

Youve defined social media goals and are acting upon them now what? Its time to prove the value of your efforts. Over 50 percent of marketers struggle with tying social media activities to business outcomes.

Additionally, a study conducted by Altimeter outlined the reasons why several organizations avoid focusing on social media ROI because of:An inability to tie social media to business outcomes 56 percentA lack of analytics, expertise and/or resources 39 percentPoor tools 38 percentInconsistent analytical approaches 35 percentUnreliable data 30 percentWe say no more, compadre!Its critical to identify and implement the tools and processes required to measure your social media ROI once youve established your social media goals. This will more than likely involve UTM tracking codes to monitor where traffic is coming from, building custom landing pages, and more.

Here are some tools you should consider implementing:Google Analytics. Track website traffic, sign-ups, and conversions stemming from social media campaigns.A good CRM.

Most CRMs allow you to see the URLs for incoming leads so you can determine the source of traffic and accurately attribute them. Furthermore, youre able to determine which campaigns and messaging are working, and whats not. The leads in your CRM are also a good way to verify the information displayed in Google Analytics.

If youre looking for something basic, Hubspot has a great CRM that is both functional and intuitive. The best part? Its free!

Third-party social media platforms. Platforms such as Hootsuite or Hubspot have great built-in analytics. You should be able to effectively track reach, conversions, and more insights about your social media activities.

See Also: 3 Strategies to Inspire Your Social Media MarketingCalculate your social media ROIYouve set your goals and selected which social media tools youre going to use. Now you need to calculate your ROI. All your social media efforts should be trackable so youre never scrambling to prove the value of a campaign.

Here are some tips:Build out reporting templates to track the metrics that matter most to youThere are two different ways to monitor and analyze data: manual or automated. If youve opted to use a marketing automation platform like Hubspot, there are visual dashboards that allow you to quickly view and analyze the impact of your social media marketing efforts and how they tie into your sales. If youre not using a marketing automation platform yet, youre most likely going to need to use a spreadsheet to track the progress and impact of your social media marketing efforts.

You can use the built-in reporting tools from Google Analytics, Facebook Business Manager, LinkedIn, Twitter, and any other social media channels you use to pull the data youre looking for.Then, youll consolidate and organize the data into your shiny, new marketing spreadsheet to determine the effectiveness of your social media efforts. Check your social media metrics consistentlyDoing this well help you analyze the types of content your audience is most engaged with, identify the best times to post, and gain a deeper understanding of your audience demographics across each social media platform.

You may be surprised to find out that youre speaking to different audiences on Facebook and Instagram.Automate reporting where you canSocial media marketing takes a lot of time, and a bulk of it is spent analyzing and reporting data. The ideal solution that saves time on manual reporting is a marketing automation platform; however, these are not always the most affordable solution for small businesses especially startups.

If you cant afford a marketing automation platform yet, Google Analytics allows you to create custom reports that display only the data that matters most to you. Although its not a complete social media marketing platform, it will allow for you to keep an eye on key metrics such as which channels are contributing to your website traffic, which pages are most visited, how long users are staying on your website, and much more. Proving social media ROI has never been so easy as it is now.

With the right goals, metrics, and systems in place to support your social efforts, youll be able to quickly identify its value, pinpoint whats working and whats not, and ultimately maximize returns.Originally published at on December 20, 2016. For more help planning, starting, and funding your business, check out Bplans free downloadable business resources.

RELATED QUESTION I heard that NASA hit the moon with something and it rang like a gong, therefore the moon would have to be hollow. Is there any truth to this? Although this is a cool idea to imagine, there are number of simple considerations that should make it clear that the story you heard is apocryphal (and simply impossible).

Earth's moon has virtually no atmosphere although there is a higher quantity (i.e. density) of atomic and molecular particles near the surface of the moon than out in the cold vacuum of the interplanetary medium (i.

e. what we call outer space within the solar system), the overall density of those particles floating near the moon is so low that the lunar atmosphere is really only a technical concept used for scientific reasons; that atmosphere is essentially nonexistent when compared to the densely gaseous atmosphere enveloping the Earth.Sound cannot travel in a vacuum or to put that more accurately, sound waves require a physical medium in which to travel.

Unlike electromagnetic waves such as light or radio-waves or x-rays, which exist at times in both a physical state as a particle but also as a quantum waveform, sound waves are purely physical. In fact, soundwaves are simply a measure of the rhythmic compression and expansion of any material that receives an impact, much like a slinky if you stretch it out and then push-and-pull one end while the other end remains still (a commonly used demonstration of the properties of physical waves). Although we perceive these physical compression-waves as sounds, due to the particular mechanism through which our brain has evolved to handle them, what we are actually detecting is the back-and-forth pulsations of air particles pushing against each other.

Even though our bodies have evolved to be (mostly) oblivious of the movements of the particles of air around us, we are in fact all living within a massive soup of various gaseous molecules, and it is these molecules moving and pushing each other that eventually translates sound into our ears. Therefore the lunar atmosphere is too thin to carry sound gaseous particles will disperse over time to evenly fill the space in which they exist, due to the properties of thermodynamics. Thus, the gaseous molecules of the thin lunar atmosphere end up widely spaced out And much like dominoes that are spaced too widely, the farther that each molecule has to travel to hit the next, the less likely that any detectable sound will propogate.

Or to put it differently, imagine shooting a cueball at a nicely clumped group of billiards. One ball will hit another (or sometimes several) and as the balls hit each other, those that are struck will roll until they hit other, and so on. However, when you shoot your cueball toward a very spread out collection of billiards, it becomes far less likely that the first ball you hit will go on to hit another, etc.

This is really just a fancy way to say that sound cannot exist in a vacuum but it also won't be detectable in very thin atmospheres. Thus, even if someone were to hit the moon, we wouldn't really be able to hear it (though we can absolutely measure seismic activity, which is a somewhat comparable form of detecting physical waves).The moon is far too massive to significantly impact the moon is not very dense (slightly more than half that of the Earth).

Nor is it very big (about 1/50 of the Earth's size). However, relative to anything that humans could manufacture (let alone fire into space), the moon is incredibly massive. To be specific, it is estimated that the moon weighs in at 7.

342E22 kg (about 1/100th of Earth's mass) to be clear, that's approximately 700000000000000000000000 kilograms. By contrast, the heaviest spacecraft ever launched (the space shuttle Endeavor) weighs in at a measly 541,285 kg, or about 7.37210^-18 times the mass of the moon.

Again, to be clear, that is about 0.000000000000000007372 times the mass of the moon. As vibration due to impact (e.

g. the sound caused by hitting something) is a function of energy transferred, and total kinetic energy of an object (i. e.

momentum) is a function of mass, it can be reasonably assumed that the tremendous difference in mass between Earth's moon and the largest object ever launched into space by humans means that even an incredibly high speed impact would impart almost no detectable sound within the moon. To further understand this, consider the mass of a small desktop gongsay, an 8 gong found on the Amazon marketplace; this small gong weighs in at 8.8 ounces, which is the equivalent of about 0.

25 kg here on Earth. To understand the ratio of masses between the moon and the Endeavor spacecraft, an equivalently small impact relative to the mass of a gong would have to come from an object that weighs a mere 10^-18 kg Which is just about the mass of a single HIV-1 viral body. Literally a single, microscopic virus.

Can you imagine a single virus being thrown at a gong hard enough to make a sound? Because that's how hard we would have to hit the moon to make any detectable sound