Determining the value of social media to advertisers may be more complicated than it seems. Here’s some things to consider.
Website Traffic
Merchants should be able to correlate the lift in web traffic from social media posts. For example, a merchant could measure traffic from a post on Tuesday at 2 p.m. to one from the previous week. But taking seasonality and external events into play, the best method is to compare traffic over multiple days and multiple posts. Averaging the lift over time helps to correlate sales from each social channel, to assign the percentage of overall conversions to the source. A merchant could verify the impact by stopping social media activity for a week or two and then track total sales and traffic.
ROI
The process of calculating your social media ROI involves collecting your data and aligning it to your goals. You will need to look at different social media ROI metrics such as impressions, engagements and link clicks. Then compare these metrics against the cost of running your campaign to make sense of your ROI. This can be a time-consuming and complicated process. But there are tools to simplify your ROI measurement. For instance, you can use Sprout’s Advocacy ROI Calculator Tool to see how your employee advocacy program is paying off. This lets you measure your social media ROI in terms of brand awareness, lead generation and hiring.
Research Value
Social media gives the option to directly reach out to customers and engage them on an array of topics without the expensive cost of a focus group. It also gives them a chance to feel like they are part of a brand, especially when they’re asked about things like what a brand should add to its menu.
Engagement
Engagement (such as likes, shares and comments) may be considered the most important metric for evaluating the success of a social media strategy, followed by the number of followers. Therefore, building a community that will follow and connect with your brand is the key to increased valuation. Ways a company can grow its following and social media presence are to (1) post high-quality content several times a day (especially content that can be shared or reposted, which can lead to new followers), and/or (2) pose questions in order to spark conversation with its followers.
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