While none would doubt that well done social media marketing can be a huge boon for a company, what’s more difficult to figure out is how well it’s working and what kind of return you’re getting on your investment. Unlike other forms of advertising, social media marketing involves a disproportionately large amount of intangible costs, and often pays off in the form of intangible benefits. Employing services like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube for your social media marketing campaign may be free, but diverting the manpower and time to successfully pull it off isn’t. Not to mention, it’s neigh impossible to expect a quantifiable increase in traffic or sales for every one, or two, or three people you may devote to your social media marketing team.
However, this do
esn’t mean there isn’t a way to measure the impact social media marketing is having on your company. On the contrary, so long as you come in with a clear set of goals along with an understand of what social media marketing can and can’t do, the more possible it becomes to figure out how it’s serving you.
For starters, it’s important to understand that a large amount of the value in social media marketing comes in the form of qualitative benefits, rather than quantitative ones. What this means is that, by reaching out to your users and customers on sites like Facebook and Twitter are likely to build things like loyalty, trust, interaction, and brand awareness. Though undeniably important, measuring these kinds of metrics can be difficult. However, by designating specific values that you want to see improve as a result of your social media marketing campaign can make this process far simpler.
For instance, you could chose to measure your success on how many people in a certain demographic are following your Tweets, or how many people used a specific discount you’re offering through a given channel. Regardless, of what it is, determine which of these success metrics are relevant to your social media marketing campaign by seeing how well it translates into a quantitative business context.
Say, for example, you’re in the midst of a social media marketing campaign offering a discount to the first five customers who post a comment on a given post of the company blog. By doing so, you’re not only measuring the percent increase in sales since starting your social media marketing, but you also have a very defined idea of where these sales originated from and how they have impacted your baseline numbers.
From there, it’s simply a process of evaluating your social media marketing campaign to determine what works and what doesn’t. Remember, however, that at its core, the return on your social media marketing investment should be just as much what you’ve learned from previous successes and failures as it is how much it benefits your company’s bottom line.
Written by Kenny K.
