There's no denying the benefits of social media for brands, yet it remains a challenge measuring ROI across social channels. Is a tweet worth more than a Like? How many hours should a business devote to maintaining an active social presence?

A recent white paper from Adobe found that 88 per cent of marketers didn't feel they could measure the effectiveness of social media campaigns, with over half claiming calculating ROI was a major factor. As social spends are increasing the need to measure becomes more crucial.

While there's no single or best way to measure ROI, there are some easy steps you can do to start calculating returns on all those tweets, posts and updates.

Conversions

An easy way to begin is by tracking conversions. Is your business generating sales from clients who arrived at your website via a social platform?

What percentage of people who Like your Facebook page or follow you on Twitter have made purchases?

By looking for correlations between social customers and sales you can begin attributing values to these metrics.

Traffic

Not everyone who visits your website will make a purchase, but this doesn't mean the data isn't valuable.

For example, if you run a pay-per-click campaign which platform funnelled the most visitors to your website? Was it Facebook ads, Google AdSense or Promoted Tweets? What percentage of these visitors make purchases?

By taking a long term view you can begin to see how ad campaigns have performed. If the cost of your campaign was less than the sales it generated you can begin measuring its true cost. 

Content

Instead of a scattergun approach to posts, think about producing content with specific goals and objectives. What you want each post to achieve, is it education, brand awareness, sales?

Experiment with different types of content – mix up text updates with photos and videos. Try leveraging hashtags and mentioning relevant users or brands in your posts. 

When patterns emerge you can begin assigning values to certain types of posts and tweak your social strategies around this.

Check out SMK’s upcoming industry leading training courses in: Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Perth, Canberra, Auckland, Adelaide and Wellington.

Also, browse through hundreds of online social media video tutorials on eSMK Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and more!!