DreamGrow Social Media

How To Measure Social Media ROI

The number one thing about ROI is that it is measured in dollars (or in euros or any other currency you might prefer). Wikipedia tells us that:

In finance, rate of return (ROR), also known as return on investment (ROI), rate of profit or sometimes just return, is the ratio of money gained or lost (whether realized or unrealized) on an investment relative to the amount of money invested.

This means that whatever non-monetary goals we might achieve, we have to translate them into dollars. The basic business metrics you should measure are:

• Number of transactions
• Number of customers
• Number of new customers
• Revenue
• Profit

Get these numbers tracked before you do anything else. You probably already have a specialist for this job, she’s called accountant. But the thing is, that for most of us, our social media activities influence these metrics only indirectly. Some of our social marketing goals may be:

• Website visitors
• Leads
• Brand awareness
• Newsletter sign-ups
• Facebook fans
• Blog comments
• Social mentions
• Visitor satisfaction index

Now, the trick is to find the connections between social results and dollars earned. Start with the simplest of correlations. Here are just a few examples:

How is the number of your monthly website visitors related to revenue. Segment that and tie website visits to revenue from online and offline segments. Secment yet again and find the most effective online revenue drivers. What you want to know is if site traffic increases X% then revenue goes up how much?

Find out if the customers who are your Facebook fans make purchases more often. Check if the Facebook fans are making larger transactions than average. What you want to know is if your Facebook’s fan-base grows X% then what’s the corresponding increase in frequency of transactions.

Start to monitor the social chatter and tie the number of mention on the internet to changes in sales volume. Segment that and find out what channels have the most impact on the bottom line.

If your sales are mostly online then it is easier to measure all those metrics. When you are operating offline then you have to conduct customer surveys and ask specific questions to figure out why they are doing business with you. You can also implement various incentives to track people from online to offline. For example we have done this for our client by giving Facebook fans special deals that can be used offline and then measuring the results of those activities.

After you have collected these data for some time, you will be able to make pretty good predictions how different social media activities influence you cash flow. A word of caution, don’t stop experimenting. Use 5-10% of your marketing budget for experiments and you will be ahead of the pack.

And, of course, make note of your spending on customer acquisition and establish a base-line. Include all marketing spending. Make note of how much is spent on different channels online and off. Separate the parts that are hard to measure (new logo, upgrading content management system, etc.).

ROI is about the R. Return. No return, no ROI or more precisely negative ROI (ROI = (return – investment) / investment.). One million Facebook fans won’t make any difference if you don’t know how to turn them into paying customers. From our post Social Media ROI Will Become Important:

Consistency, predictability and repeatability are important when dealing with ROI. Experiment with small budgets. Weed out money losers and channel the funds to profitable activities.

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Image credit foxumon

Social Media ROI Will Become Important

As we predicted 2010 is the year when a lot of money will be invested in social media. When serious money starts to pour in then the guys upstairs want to see some results. Until now people have experimented with low budgets and without very specific goals. The bigger budgets will bring an need to show return.

Return on investment is very simple. You put something in – the investment, you get something out – the return, and later should be higher that the former.

ROI = (return – investment) / investment.

Now the question is what is social media ROI. The trick in the investment side is not to leave anything out. If you spend half of your time managing communities on social networking sites then half of your salary should be considered as an investment in your social media efforts. We estimate that close to two thirds of social media budgets may be used in-house. Social media expenditures can be any of the following:

• advertising
• content creation
• IT
• public relations
• discounts
• call center
• payroll
• R&D
• etc

If we do stuff in the right way we are going to see some results. These results are not yet ROI. You should call something a return if you can attach a dollar sign to it. Some of the results you might see are:

• web site visitors
• followers
• newsletter sign-ups
• RSS readers
• retweets
• blog comments
• WOM
• mentions in press
• RFPs
• share of voice

Some of these result are relevant to your business. Select the results that apply and set concrete goals what you want to achieve. Make sure that you note the existing levels of that metric so you can attribute the change to your activities. For instance if you have 10,000 monthly visitors to the company web site, then mark it down as a starting point.

Now you have to find out how to tie these results to actual monetary business value. How much money comes in because of your activities. For example you may have 1,000 Facebook fans and get 100 visitors per month from your Facebook fan page. 25 of those visitors make a purchase that gives you 500 dollars of profit. Now you know that if the quality of fans is constant each additional fan will generate 50 cents of profit per month. You could use up to 49 cents per month acquiring more fans through advertising or other activities and still have a positive ROI. Consistency, predictability and repeatability are important when dealing with ROI. Experiment with small budgets. Weed out money losers and channel the funds to profitable activities.

As soon as you can show positive ROI bosses will get really happy, invite you to dinner, pat on your back and give you a rise (don’t forget to include some of that rise in the investment part of the ROI formula). Budgets will grow even further.