• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Pro Blog Service

  • Business Blogging
    • Blogging and Content Marketing for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
    • Social Media Strategy and Consulting
    • Blogging Services
    • Content Factory
    • Need a Law Blog or Legal Blog?
    • Download Our Whitepaper: ROI On Hiring a Ghost Blogger
    • Pro Blog Service Books
  • Blog
  • Speaking
  • About Us
    • Erik Deckers
    • 4 Simple Rules for Guest Posting on Our Blog
  • Get Ghost Blogging Quote
  • Link Sharing/Contributed Articles

December 26, 2011 By Erik Deckers

You Don’t Get Social Media ROI Yet? C’mon, Man!

I was feeling good about social media ROI, and how/whether people understand it. I figured, at least my people — marketers — get it. They understand how to measure social media, or at least the principles behind it.

Apparently not.

eMarketer dashed those hopes to the ground with their December 20, 2011 article When Will Social Media Measurement Mature?.

Marketers know that counting fans, “likes” and followers is not the best way to measure success in social media marketing. Yet these metrics are often the top benchmarks for performance. It’s not surprising, then, that marketers consider calculating return on investment to be the biggest challenge of using social media, and that a majority of them believe they cannot measure social media campaigns effectively.

How to Calculate Social Media ROI

Calculating the ROI of anything is easy. Subtract how much you spent from how much you made, and that’s your answer. If you spent $10,000 on a social media marketing campaign, and you made $50,000, your social media ROI is $40,000.

Simple, right?

$50,000 – $10,000 = $40,000.

So how do you know whether sales are coming from your social media efforts?

I’m not going to delve into the step-by-step process, but I’ll give you the tools and concepts you’re going to need to get started.

  1. Set up Google Analytics, and install the code on every page on your website. If you have a blog, it only needs to be part of the code. If it’s on a website with pre-built pages, it needs to be on every page.
  2. Set up a Bitly account. Bitly is a URL shortener that also lets you do some basic analytics on the number of people that have clicked your link.
  3. Create a Google Analytics tracking campaign for any and all major links you’re sending out. This is how you’re going to measure a particular blog post, tweet, Facebook status update, etc. If it’s just a basic link to the website, a campaign code is optional. But if it’s a blog post about a particular marketing campaign, set up the Google Analytics campaign.
  4. Put a hyperlinked call to action in your blog posts that take people directly to a sales page or order page. Make sure that the hyperlink is given a unique campaign code.

Here’s what will happen:

  • You’ll send out a link to a blog post via Twitter, Facebook, etc. Let’s say that 10,000 people see that link on your various accounts.
  • 1,000 people visit your page and read that blog post, all within a 6-hour span.
  • Of that 1,000 people, 100 people actually make a purchase with a total of $10,000 in sales.
  • Those 100 people also fill out their contact information, which gets placed into your CRM.

By looking at these numbers, you can determine a number of things.

  • 1,000 visitors out of 10,000 social media followers, fans, and friends means you have a 10% click-through rate.
  • 100 sales out of 1,000 visitors is a 10% close rate; out of a 10,000-person network, that’s a 1% close rate.
  • By looking at the entrance and exit paths of that particular 6-hour period, or particular day, you can see that a majority of people were moved enough by the blog post to go directly to the order page. Compare that to another blog post that only lead to 30 sales out of 1,000 visitors, and you know it wasn’t as effective in moving people to act.
  • You can then subtract the cost of that particular campaign from the amount of money you made to calculate the total ROI for the day/week/month.

Calculating social media ROI is not that difficult. It’s just a matter of having the right tools and knowing basic analytics and campaign creation. There are literally hundreds of articles and several books on each step I first described. It’s just a matter of reading, and then trying out what you’ve learned. With some trial and error, and constant measuring, you’ll soon learn what works and what you can stop doing.

Or you could just hire a social media professional to do it all for you.

Related content:

  1. Fast Company Doesn’t Know You Can Calculate Social Media ROI
  2. Measure the Three Most Important Business Metrics With Social Media
  3. Quantify the Value of Social Media for a Music or Arts Festival
  4. Calling ‘Bullshit’ On Four Social Media Myths
  5. Why Companies are Afraid of Social Media
Better Related Posts Plugin

Filed Under: Marketing, Social Media, Social Media Analytics, Social Media Marketing Tagged With: marketing, ROI, social media marketing, social networking

About Erik Deckers

Erik Deckers is the President of Pro Blog Service, a content marketing and social media marketing agency He co-authored four social media books, including No Bullshit Social Media with Jason Falls (2011, Que Biz-Tech), and Branding Yourself with Kyle Lacy (3rd ed., 2017, Que Biz-Tech), and The Owned Media Doctrine (2013, Archway Publishing). Erik has written a weekly newspaper humor column for 10 papers around Indiana since 1995. He was also the Spring 2016 writer-in-residence at the Jack Kerouac House in Orlando, FL.

Primary Sidebar

Subscribe via RSS

Categories

Tags

advice bloggers blog writing books book writing business blogging citizen journalism Communication content marketing copywriting crisis communication digital marketing Ernest Hemingway Facebook freelance writing ghost blogging ghostwriting Google grammar Jason Falls journalism language Linkedin marketing media networking newspapers No Bullshit Social Media personal branding public relations public speaking punctuation ROI SEO Social Media social media experts social media marketing social networking storytelling traditional media Twitter video writers writing writing skills

Archives

Footer

Recent Posts

  • A Quick and Dirty Editorial Calendar
  • Stop Saying ‘In These Troubled Times’: 5 Amateur Mistakes Content Marketers Keep Making
  • Sportswriters, Don’t Give Up Game Recaps for Social Media
  • Writing the Old Fashioned Way (GUEST POST)
  • Jargon Words Are the Hallmarks of a Pretentious Ass

BUY ERIK DECKERS’ LATEST BOOK

Erik Deckers' and Kyle Lacy's book - Branding Yourself now available at Amazon buy button for Branding Yourself book

Request a Quote – It’s easy

We write blog posts, manage social media campaigns, write online press releases, write monthly news letters and can write your website content.

Let's figure out the right package for you.

DOWNLOAD FREE WHITEPAPER

Looking for a cost effective way to business blog

Blogging in house can be expensive and time consuming. Professional Blog Service can cut costs by up to 80%.

Find out how much your company can save with ProBlogService.com with this FREE Whitepaper.

© Copyright 2020 Professional Blog Service, LLC.

All rights reserved. Use of this site indicates your consent to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

1485 Oviedo Mall Boulevard Oviedo, FL 32765
Call us at (317) 674-3745

Contact Us About