This week Kara and I (Liesel) attended the PRSM Summit in Milwaukee – and loved it. Being among our peers reviewing successful case studies and learning best practices for social media and marketing campaigns was incredible. One of the sessions we attended was called “Social Media Measurement and What ROI Really Means,” presented by Sara Meaney (@sarameaney). Great presentation – here’s what it was all about.
Everyone wants their social media campaigns to be successful, but most people don’t really define success before starting, which means they are doomed to fail! When starting a social media campaign, there are some important steps to take in order to achieve success.
- Use Baselines. Start your campaign by seeing where you are now. It doesn’t matter what metric you are using, but be sure to measure as much as possible.
- Create Goals. This is where you need to start being careful. There is a difference between metrics and real ROI (more on this in a moment)
- Promote. This isn’t the Ronco Showtime Rotisserie where you can “set it and forget it.” Once your campaign is launched, there is still work to do. Keep spreading the word during (and even after) the campaign.
- Review Results. This is where your baselines come into importance. Look at those same measurements post-campaign and see how you moved the meter. Did your metrics change? Did you meet your goals?
Metrics vs. ROI
Contrary to popular belief, ROI is not number of likes on Facebook, the number of retweets you get, or the number of impressions on your YouTube channel. Those are metrics. While important to watch, they are different than ROI.
Since you will be measuring your campaign, here are 10 metrics that you may want to watch:
- Leads generated
- Website bounce rate
- Website behavior
- Growth of your engaged base
- Brand mentions across social platforms
- Website visitors and sources of traffic
- Conversions to subscriptions
- Time spent engagement
- Engagement ratio (active network/total network)
- Sharing
ROI, on the other hand, has much more weight and long-term importance. According to Sara, ROI can be broken down into four categories:
- Brand Objectives (long term; indirectly financial): awareness, sentiment, WOM, loyalty, recruitment
- Risk Management (long term; directly financial): decrease risk, increase response effectiveness and speed
- Digital (short term; indirectly financial): increased searchability, enhanced owned/earned assets
- Financial (short term; directly financial): increased sales
These are the real things to watch; these are the things that will determine your ROI. You still need to watch your metrics for trends, but be careful not to confuse them with real ROI measurements.
Not everyone will have the same goals or ROI measurements, so you have to determine what’s right for you. The important thing is to measure, because if you can measure it, you can move it!