How to Calculate Your ROI With Social Media
When it comes to measuring and tracking online and trying to determine what your return on investment is with social media, you first need to ask yourself why you want to participate in social media in the first place. If the answer is to build your brand and develop a loyal following, then you are in it for the right reasons. Currency in social media is found in both relationships and content.
Still, you can't improve what you don't measure. So if your goal is to measure traffic, sales, or SEO ranking, here are some free tools that can help:
You can find out who is talking about you online and what the conversation is about by simply setting up a few monitoring systems such as Google alerts and monitoring Twitter Search. You can also monitor how your competitors are being talked about online compared to your company with these same tools. You would know this if you are tracking your retweets through a system like Tweetdeck, receiving notifications when your name hits the web through Google alerts, and doing blog searches on sites such as Technorati.
The next step is to measure your success by asking whether you were able to build more relationships with your target market through your efforts online. You can reach out to your target market by typing in keyword searches in the connection section on social sites. For example, on LinkedIn you can use the "search people" tool. If you are in the hospitality industry you can enter keywords such as food, chef, wine, and restaurant. You can also search groups by keyword to connect you to target market communities.
Then, form stronger relationships with these contacts to convert them into fans. One of the best ways to build stronger relationships is to engage with contacts through conversation.
Facebook allows you to set up a company page and share valuable content, videos, company insider posts and more. This is an excellent way and place to build a fan club online.
No matter how your social media efforts and results are measured, businesses still need to be able to determine whether or not a social media program is raising the bar, moving product, or otherwise making an impact. This largely depends on the company's social media objectives. Because these objectives dramatically differ based on the organization, it's impossible to agree upon standards.