Measuring The Effectiveness Of Social Media

If you’re a CMO and want to convince your CEO to implement a social media campaign or program, talk to him in terms of ROI, sales, revenue, anything that demonstrates tangible results.

Furthermore, rather than trying to convince management to go all out with a social media campaign from the very beginning, test it out first, measure its results, and you’ll have a much easier time selling your idea.

A survey released by the The Fournaise Marketing Group claims that 73% of CEO’s think that the marketers they work with lack credibility and 77% of CEO’s say that marketers talk to them in terms of brand values, brand equity, or other ambiguous topics that are not measurable.

Let’s say you create a Facebook page, Twitter page, YouTube videos, and use AdWords to get leads through an e-mail marketing campaign. All of those social media campaigns should be connected to a website, which gives visitors the option of buying your product or service.

Make incremental investments in your social media campaigns and see if they have an effect on your bottom line through short questionnaires. Ask people who have actually bought something from your website.

What social media channel did they use to follow you? How involved were they? If you find that your social media investments are affecting the purchasing decisions of your prospects, you now have a valid case to scale your social media campaign.

For example, if you find that 25% of your customers would not have purchased from you had they not followed you on Facebook: bingo. You now know that your efforts are yielding tangible results.

Some social media experts like to calculate the ROI of social media much like advertisements, in which you calculate ROI based off short term results which don’t take into account things like customer retention, brand equity, customer service, etc.

Social media is like a friend to your prospects, giving them helpful information and encouraging trust. The only way to see if this “friend” actually affects your bottom line is by simply asking your customers how often they use it.

If you see a correlation between social media use and sales (through a statistically significant correlation), you now have a case for scaling your campaign.

The questionnaire approach simplifies things. For example, if you sold 100 products and your Google Analytics data shows that 25% of your traffic is “direct”, where is the direct traffic coming from? People who remembered you through your Facebook account, Twitter page?

Even if you know exactly how much social media traffic you are getting to your site, your non-social media traffic may very well be giving you most of your sales. Asking your customers after the sale, what influenced them to buy, takes all of those variables out of the equation.

 

Nickolay Lamm is an internet marketing specialist who manages InventHelp Scam Watch and other web properties.