Calculating social media return on investment can seem a lot like rocket surgery; impossible and, well, not a real thing. If you’re having trouble measuring social media success for your company, you could be making these common mistakes!
For a lot of businesses, calculating social media ROI can seem a lot like rocket surgery; impossible and, well, not a real thing. If your business falls into this category, don’t worry—you’re not alone. According to The CMO Survey only 15% of companies have been able to quantitatively prove the impact of social media.
So where is everyone else going wrong? To answer that, we’ve put together a list of four common mistakes companies make when trying to determine their social media ROI:
Not Measuring At All
Say what? That’s right. Last year, over 50% of companies didn’t even try to measure their social media ROI. If your company is guilty of this, remember that signing up for social media accounts may be free, but managing them is anything but. When you consider the time spent planning and executing any kind of social media plan, the dollars begin to add up.
With more and more C-level executives demanding proof of social media’s worth, you’ll want to be ahead of the game when your boss asks to see the numbers. If you’re looking for a guide to get you started stop what you’re doing and go read Social Media ROI 101 right now!
Not Setting Goals
If you don’t know what you’re trying to achieve, it’ll be pretty hard to measure your effectiveness. Before you get the ball rolling on your campaign, it’s essential to take the time to figure out what you want the end results to be. Do you want to increase website visits? Or, maybe you want followers to redeem an offer or buy a product. Whatever the case is for your company, going through a goal setting process will help focus your social media efforts and give you a basis for measuring its success.
Measuring the Wrong Things
So maybe your company is among those that are trying to determine social media ROI, but you still keep missing the mark. It very well could be that you’re just measuring the wrong metrics. With the sheer volume of insights that are available, it’s easy to get caught up in statistics that seem impressive but are useless as far as your bottom line is concerned. For instance, knowing that your company has 100,000 followers is awesome but to determine meaningful ROI, you’ll need to know how those followers are engaging with your brand in terms of the goals you’ve set.
Not Using the Right Tools
Tracking clicks and data across social channels and aligning it all with sales data and lead generation is confusing at best. That’s why it’s important to have the right tools to help you piece everything together. For free solutions, check out this article from Entrepreneur.
Making sense of the social world from a business perspective can be tough. At SocialToaster we have the tools and know-how to take the guess work out of it all. Give us a call today and chat with our team of ROI experts and see how SocialToaster can work for you!
