How to Measure ROI for Social Media Marketing

Measuring an accurate return on investment for each business operation is quite necessary as it gives businesses an idea about how successful their strategies are and how effective their processes are. Measuring an accurate ROI for social media marketing is complex and difficult, and due to this very reason many eCommerce sellers hesitate to initiate such a strategy. However, through the following metrics, you can measure the ROI of your social media marketing efforts up to a certain limit.    

Referring domains or traffic sources

When you are selling on eBay, Amazon or Etsy, you don't have access to the information about how the customer found the product they were looking for even though the marketplaces have that information. But you can definitely learn how your customers visited your store or item pages if you are selling on eBay or Etsy. This is called referring traffic or traffic source.

If you are selling on eBay store, traffic reports will be included in your subscription price. From this report, you will know from where your customers came, i.e., if they found you through eBay search or through your Facebook page.

Amazon doesn't offer traffic source information to merchants, but merchants do have access to total traffic per item data.

Followers

You can gauge the success of your social media presence by monitoring the number of followers you have. As your following grows, so does your influence. Initially your followers may just consist of people who know you but as you continue to share interesting and informative content, interested people too will start following you.

Approval

When you get a "Like" on Facebook and Pinterest, a "Heart" on Instagram, a "+1" on Google+, and a "Favorite" on Twitter, it means your content is being liked by the readers and they are approving it. Monitor how many of your posts garner approval and study the trend of the most liked posts. This will help you understand what's working for you and what's not.
 
Comments

On social media platforms, readers have an option to offer their comment. Whenever the readers come across interesting content, they tend to comment or reply. Monitor and measure how many comments and replies your content is receiving.

Shares, retweets and repins

Whenever the readers like your content, they will share it, retweet it and repin it on various platforms. This simply means that your content is being shared without any cost or effort from your side, and this is the best feature of social networks. So always aim to create the type of content that the users would like to rebroadcast on their own without any prodding.

While monitoring shares, retweets and repins, do understand getting likes, shares or comments on every post is impossible. If a post doesn't get any interest from the users, try posting similar content at a different time of the day and gauge its success. If it doesn't seem to be working, it's better to avoid such content in the future.

Posted in: return on investment (ROI), social media marketing, social media platforms, social media promotion, social networking