How to evaluate your Social Media Campaign ? (R.O.I.)

Businesses are struggling with how to evaluate the effectiveness of their social media campaigns. Currently, most companies are using a variety of metrics to measure diverse campaigns across multiple departments. These metrics fail to provide an overarching picture of which marketing programs are increasing their revenues. There are five metrics that accurately measure success in terms of ROI and revenues from social media for all enterprises, both big and small, B2B and consumer web, and across multiple geographies. The following post provides case studies for three of these five metrics. I will outline the other two metrics in a subsequent post.

1. Social media revenue conversion measures how many people become customers through social media referral channels.

Challenges: Social media is great for creating awareness and engagement, but it is hard to measure how many people convert to customers. Facebook’s last click attribution attempts to measure customer conversions by tracking which Facebook links sent people to other websites. However, this doesn’t work well either because there is a delay in the conversion.

For example, someone might see that a friend has posted a link to a brand’s website on Facebook. However, the brand has no way of tracking who clicked on the link, or finding out the social influence of her friends, or if she ultimately made a purchase. Privacy rules also limit companies’ ability to track the entire social shopping cycle. And unfortunately,Facebook Insights (which provides Facebook page metrics) does not offer any context to help the brand discover what motivated someone to click on a link.

2. Facebook engagement measures a brand’s ability to communicate successfully with their customers on the social network.

Challenges: Most global brands have multiple Facebook fan pages. Different products and specific regions have their own pages, which are managed by different groups within the company. Businesses need an integrated view of engagement across all fan pages and Facebook app campaigns, so that they can understand what increases their numbers of fans and how this growth compares with industry standards.

3. Social customer support metrics measure the impact of customer support on brand health and the cost of staffing a social support program.

Challenges: Today, people expect their favorite brands to have customer service representatives available on Twitter and Facebook. Companies are trying to figure out how many staff members they need to devote to social customer support and how to best measure the success of such programs. There are several tools commonly used by companies that measure the ROI by counting the number of users supported via social media, but this does not reflect success at a strategic level.