How to calculate the ROI of Social Media

3 essential social media measurement questions, answered

Do Likes, Comments and Shares have value?

Numbers of likes, comments, shares are often dismissed as vanity metrics that lack real business impact. That’s true to an extent, but don’t be fooled! For some organisations - especially in B2B marketing - these metrics can be strong indicators of success or failure.

Most organisations just need to put these metrics into context, i.e. analyse their engagement rate and benchmark over time, or against competitors. And, of course, not all engagements are equal – Facebook comments, shares and tags, for example, are worth far more than Likes - as they drive stories in the newsfeed and can also act as valuable recommendations.

How should we approach reach/impressions and engagement rate?

Most of us want to know many people we reached and how many of those engaged with our content. But these metrics also offer a valuable quality check on the strength of our content and its appeal to our audience. Reach and engagement trends need to be benchmarked over time and monitored as the primary health indicators of your channels.

Remember: reach can be affected by advertising spend and a significant increase in reach will push your engagement rate down, so you need to be aware of cause and effect.

How can we measure the impact of influencers?

Influencer marketing has opened up a new space in analytics in which the focus is restricted to the impact a few, highly visible accounts have a larger audience – as well as each other. How this works is best demonstrated with an example…

At my agency, OST Marketing, we recently ran a campaign for Thomson Reuters in which our entire focus was on 30 influencers within the financial risk and compliance sector. Through our engagement with these individuals over a two month period we generated nearly 700 re-tweets and reached an estimated 1.3 million people within this very niche sector.

We used a specialist influencer marketing tool to track our engagements with these influencers, but also their impact on each other and their own audiences. This highly focused approach gave added relevance to our reach and engagement metrics and required us to consider a definition of ‘advocacy’, as the influencers gave positive endorsements.

These are just three of the questions we’ll be addressing in our webinar tomorrow. I hope you can join us for that.

Luke Brynley-Jones, founder and MD of OST Marketing, offers his insights into three key social media measurement questions that most marketers need to address. Luke will be hosting a free webinar “How to Calculate the ROI of Social Media?” on Wednesday afternoon.