What do you think is the most important parameter to measure your social media performance? Fans, followers, likes, retweet, video views, referral traffic from social media, so on and so forth. The problem today is the availability of the huge overload of metrics that makes it confusing to decide a common denominator to measure ROI. Today, let us look at how you can gauge your social media performance effectively.

Steps to measure your social media returns

Identify your KPIs

Social media marketing efforts will go in vain if you are unsure about your objectives. Are you looking to drive traffic to your website or make a sale? Once you know where your social media efforts should be driven at, you can decide upon your key performance indicators or KPIs. If a sale is your goal, then you should measure your ROI on the cost per sale value. No matter your objective for investing in social media, make sure your team is on the same page as far as KPI is concerned.

Plan your social media efforts in tandem with business objectives

Most brands drive their social media campaigns to build brand awareness or make a sale or get customer signups. First, identify your business objectives that you want to push through social media and then plan campaigns accordingly. If you want to build your brand via social media, you can measure your performance in the form of brand mentions, followers or impressions.

Make use of Google analytics to track conversion

Google analytics is a powerful tool that can help you in tracking and monitoring your goals as per the behavior of your audience. Suppose you want people to sign up for your online course, you can actually monitor whether visitors are taking the action or quitting midway.

Give values to your KPIs

Now that you have decided your social media goals and set up a tracking system, it is time to assign values to your KPIs. How much would you actually earn if you did a paid advertising to get customer signups.

Analyze your competitors

What are your competitors doing in the social space? You can uncover a lot of ideas if you analyze their social media efforts. Is your competitor more active on Twitter than Facebook? Find out which channel is best working for them and create a noise on the right medium.

Source: Your guide to measure Social Media ROI

Reference: Five Steps to Measuring Your Social Media ROI

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