Branding Reason

Beginning to Measure Social Media ROI

Analytics are undeniably important and usually the only way to convince a CMO to grant a budget for social media. However, tracking social analytics hasn’t been much of a science until late. For many, social media ROI has been strictly centered around conversions, likes, followers and views. While these are all valid and still necessary, they only measure static, single-time interactions. A customer can join you on Facebook, follow you on Twitter, or even click on a link to your website once, but once that initial interaction is complete it shouldn’t continue to count towards your ROI. Instead, analysts need to look towards dynamic, ongoing interactions. Read on to learn more.

Dynamic interactions consist of ways customers continue to interact with brands after they have formed a relationship with them on social media. Generally this takes the form of conversations, such as:

• Wall posts
• Status comments
• @replies
• Retweets
• Photo uploads and comments
• Video comments
• Impressions
• Reviews
• Checkins
• and Social customer service inquiries

Tracking changes in these interactions will show how affective your social media messaging strategies are. The difference here is that likes and follows can be interpreted as users simply identifying with your brand or building out their profiles, while interactions display that customers are reacting to your marketing and messaging. This can also point out weaknesses in your approach. If you find yourself receiving a high level of replies on Twitter but little interaction on Facebook, you may not be properly communicating with your fans on that network. Likewise, if you are receiving significant views on YouTube but few comments, you may need to focus more on stimulating conversations.

Another key metric to measure is the difference between positive and negative mentions. It’s not enough to track receiving 15 new reviews on Yelp if half of them were negative. The same applies to replies on Twitter. Most third party analytics apps only produce numeric valuations, which ignore the intrinsic value of the statement. If you receive 3,000 interactions after a product launch, you may feel you had a success. Once you read those posts, however, you may learn that most were complaints or customer service requests. Though equally informative, these should carry a separate weight from positive interactions.

Once you have these measures and feedback, the next question is how to analyze the data to make recommendations. In our next post on ROI, we will relate analytics to operations to explain causes of certain outcomes.