How to measure Social Media ROI

By Ahmed Abdelghani

1- Know your brand’s goal:

• Different brands and companies have different goals on their social media platforms, knowing your brand’s goal is the first step to measure the social media ROI.The brand’s goals might be:-Engaging in social media interaction and branding.-Driving more traffic to a website.

-Online purchase. -Generating user generated content. -Driving views to videos.

2- Metrics:• To measure your social media ROI you need to analyze 4 main metrics:

1- Reach and interaction: The number of fans and followers on all your social media platforms, the PTAT for each platform, using Facebook insights and other social media tools like Socialbakers , brandwatch, mention.2-Traffic: Using google analytics to measure the traffic on your website and bit.ly to know which social media platform is driving the most traffic and how.3-Influencers, Business leads and costumers:

Measure how many influencers you have on your social media platforms and how much they are maximizing your reach, and track the numbers of business leads generated by your social media platforms that became actual costumers. 4-Development ratio: Track your performance and compare it to the performance of the previous months in order to see if you are heading in the right direction.

3- Assign Monetary Value to each metric:

• And the best method for this is:

- Using existing data:If you know what is the Lifetime Costumer Value (LCV) is, for an example it’s 100 AED , and you know that 1 in each 10 people who reached your content become costumer then the value of getting this costumer to reach your content is 10 AED. • But what if you don’t have this kind of data?Then you have to use experience and common sense based on your business plan to set the monetary value for each metric.

4- Measure Total Benefits • For each social media platform collect it’s numbers according to the

designated metric and multiply it by the monetary value. And put it down in a clear table for each platform.

•Example; Youtube:

• Video views = 4.000 • LCV = 10 AED

Total benefits = 4000 x 10 = 40000

5- Total cost:• Add all the costs paid during your social media campaign. - Labor cost - Promotion cost - Software cost -Any additional cost

And calculate the total cost .

6- Getting the results • The social media ROI is measured by this simple equation:

Benefits – Costs x 100 ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Costs

• So if the benefits = 3000 and the costs = 2000

ROI = 3000 – 2000 x 100 = 50%ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ 2000