How do you know whether social media is working for you? How do you translate comments and likes into ROI

Social media marketing has become the norm for businesses across industries and niches. It’s often hailed as one of the best digital marketing strategies – but how do you know whether it’s working for you? How do you translate comments and likes into social media ROI (return on investment)? In this blog post, I will show you how to measure your social media ROI.

Why do you need to measure your social media ROI?

Like with any marketing practice, you’re investing time, money, and effort into your social media marketing strategy. So naturally, you want to know whether your efforts are paying off. That’s not to say that if you’re not getting any clear ROI from social media that means you should quit it altogether; rather, measuring your social media success helps you understand what…

To know whether your social media marketing efforts are paying off, you need to analyze your current performance

The idea behind social media analytics, while being quite new, rests on an age-old principle — you need to understand where you are to know where you are going. To paraphrase this, to know whether your social media marketing efforts are paying off, you need to analyze your current performance. Social media platforms understand the importance of analytics, that’s why they all provide users with some form of insight. Considering how many options platforms like Facebook and Twitter offer for data analysis, trying to determine which metrics are actually valuable can be quite disorienting. Moreover, beyond your own data, there is so much more to pay attention to and derive valuable lessons from. You can identify content trends, learn more about your target audience behaviour, your competitors’ strategy, ect. These are not the kind of…

The updated report elaborates the why, what and how of selecting social media listening and engagement platforms

Social media has been evolving rapidly and presenting a wide range of new challenges and opportunities for businesses to capture the attention of customers. A series of developments, ranging from major acquisitions and closures, new privacy regulations, increasing adoption of AI; a rise of messaging apps and "dark social", the decline of social sharing and organic reach, to name a few, have been disrupting and shaping the industry. In order to stay competitive and make more informed strategic decisions, continuous learning and new approaches are required to master new social technologies and developments. In order to enable companies and individuals to understand the market and make effective decisions about the selection and use of social media monitoring tools and services, this November’s Social Media Monitoring (SMM) Tools and Services Report 2018 by …

Social media strategy and planning essentials -  Recommended dashboards and tools for creating social media marketing reports for different reporting periods

This is part 8 of my Smart Insights 12 part social media series. In the last part we looked at resource planning for social media; in this blog, I discuss what data you should capture and report to measure the impact of your social media marketing campaigns. To frame the conversation, I’ll cover four different type of report: Daily dashboard Weekly KPI report Monthly roll-up report Quarterly strategy review

Reporting scope and goals

It’s important to understand the context, and limitations, for reporting. The data you have access to depends upon your business resources and scale of social activity. For example, many small businesses don’t have subscriptions to social media monitoring tools like Audiense and Buzzsumo, so won’t be able to include data from these in their regular reports. Focus on what data you…

In new research by GetSocial, we look at new methods of sharing, the rise of Dark Social as a traffic source, the decay of the Facebook Feed and a surprising comparison of both (spoiler: dark social wins)

There are now 1.2 billion pages indexed on Google mentioning Dark Social. Definitions vary but they don’t escape much of what Alexis Madrigal wrote in 2012: “it shows up variously in programs as "direct" or typed/bookmarked" traffic (...) but that's not actually what's happening a lot of the time. Most of the time, someone g-chatted someone a link, or it came in on a big email distribution list, or your dad sent it to you.“ I call mainstream on the topic. Now, more than ever, marketers and audience developers must look at Dark Social. Not as a myth, something that may be happening,…

Chart of the day: After Snapchats controversial redesign last year, satisfaction with the app has plummeted

YouGov data suggests the app has erased two years of work in just a few months, as Snapchat's impression score and satisfaction score has dropped significantly. The survey asked users in the Unites States (US) aged 18-34, who'd then fall into the millennial category, to rate how satisfied with the SnapChat brand. YouGov do continuous tracking of brands including Snapchat, as part of their BrandIndex product. As you can see from the chart above those aged 18-34 have reported a massive drop in terms of a positive impression with Snapchat. As you can see from the chart below, there is a massive drop in satisfaction too. Those aged 18-34 have suddenly recorded a more negative impression of Snapchat and a…

ICYMI: Now that Snapchat has a new Insights feature, will it help calm down the miffed Snapchat Influencers?

With it’s recent layout change, Snapchat has been on the receiving end of some major flack from its users. There now seems to be noticeable divide between the average snapchat user and snapchat influencers, with 2 distinct pages, which led to Snapchat being accused of ‘forgetting it’s consumer’. However, that’s a debate for another time! Snapchat’s relationship with its users, particularly influencers, has been quite complicated. Especially, with competitive social media platforms being one step ahead of the game at all times, snapchat has found itself being far behind in the competition. Although, some would say that snapchat has its own set of loyal user base, which is unlikely to shake, even under competition. And some can say, Instagram is quickly catching up with Snapchat’s unique features and…

6 key metrics to measure your social media impact and social media ROI

Social media is one of those tricky topics that marketing departments know is effective for business growth, but getting this across to other departments – and specifically the C-Suite – can be difficult. Measuring vanity metrics and talking about “social shares” is not something the senior team has any interest in; you have to show the business impact and value your social activity is having. 52% surveyed in the recent Smart Insights and Clutch Social Media report confirmed that social media has positively influenced their revenue and sales with Facebook and Linkedin providing the highest value for businesses. But how to do you measure and prove this? Below we’re looking more closely at the metrics to focus on and how they can be demonstrated to the board as positively…

Frameworks for measuring social media effectiveness

I am fortunate in that I get to spend a lot of time with clients on a daily basis and my current portfolio includes 86 agencies. One increasingly frequent topic of discussion at meetings is measurement, ROI and social media in particular. *For more guidance on social selling, check out our quick win, What is Social Selling and Why is it effective?, which includes detailed advice and activities on the B2B social selling platform LinkedIn. It will help you locate, connect and engage with mre if the right type of people and how to turn them into paying clients.* Amongst clients across varying sectors I see a lot of focus on owned channels, and I believe the potential of big data enabled by social media is often underutilized. What’s more, with in-house teams growing their own capabilities, agencies will need…

How to leverage the power of social media analytics to expand your audience

These days, if you are looking to expand your audience, you should definitely try your luck on social media, simply because everyone is there. However, the problem with being present on social media, and using it to reach out to your audience, is that it can eat up a lot of your time. For instance, if you have a killer post that will provide value to the readers, you will need to come up with a headline that will grab their attention, which is usually very divided, as well as find an image that will reel them in, maybe even include hashtags, and so on. To make matters even worse, it's a shot in the dark, because even if it works like a charm, you will have no idea whatsoever why it worked. According to Arthur Mitchell, who is the…