A look into measuring ROI of social media efforts

It’s been an ongoing debate of organizations on whether to use social media and how much return on investment (ROI) can be thanked to social media efforts on its own. Experts know that social media does have a huge impact on ROI, it just has been difficult pinpointing how to measure how many viewers and users are becoming customers, with so many different channels, platforms, and intergrated marketing in general. The article Three accurate metrics for ROI on social media campaigns by Sudha Jamthe gives insight as to how this can be done and examples of best practices and implementations.

One problem has been click through retention and how organizations’ pages and outreach on platforms lead customers to the home webpage and also lead them to a purchase or branding. Moxie Interactive, working for Verizon Wireless made social media measurement a priority and tracked conversation volume, sentiments, engagements by means of tracking comments, links, likes, and shares. To get concrete numbers for a sweepstakes scenario, Moxie measured total number of sweetstakes entries and tracked links from the Facebook site compared with links found from Google Analytics.

One tool that tracks Facebook growth and engagement is SocialBakers. It is a tool for companies to track the content within Facebook group pages for companies, as well as the quality of that content (good engagement compared to one time links or spam). Going into qualitative anaylsis takes longer, but granted it is more in depth and gives more insight that a few batches of numbers over time.

Customer service has now branched onto social media platforms, as consumers almost expect companies to answer questions and field concerns via Facebook and Twitter (taking these platforms via mobiles on the go). With this growth, it has been a struggle to not only measure the amount of feedback coming through these channels, but also calculate how many employees should be on hand to work and respond to customers. Best Buy measured their need for responses and had 3,000 employees volunteer to answer social media comments from consumers throughout their work day. In three years, they have fielded 50,000 user comments (about 45 per day), which would not have trackable or even possible without the help of many employees throughout the company.

Overtime, metric capabilities for social media will be further developed but I’m happy to see some techniques and responses to get there in the mean time!