5 Common Mistakes When Measuring Social Media ROI

Okay, you have put yourself out there in the social media world, followed a few people, posted a few links and sparked a couple of conversations, what’s next?

The reason why you first embarked on this journey is because you think it will benefit your business and bring you returns. The biggest mistake you can make in social media marketing is failure to measure these returns. We have seen how to measure social media ROI but what are some of the common mistakes that people make when measuring social media performance?

1. No clear definition of the goal

If you don’t have a clear goal, you are not going anywhere. You are looking at several performance indicators (especially irrelevant ones) but you don’t exactly know what they are telling you. You are unable to measure the monetary value of your traffic and conversion rate. If you have no target, there’s nothing for you to measure.

2. More followers and fans = higher returns

It’s flattering to have a multitude of followers and fans but that does not directly translate to higher returns. Many people measure success according to the number of fans and followers they have on Facebook and Twitter respectively.

How many of your followers are reading your tweets? How many are clicking on the links you shared? How many are making actions on your website? Did you ask these questions when you look at your growing follower base?

Getting more followers is one thing, converting them into sales leads is an entire different story.

3. Not counting clicks

I find it a total waste when businesses share links on Twitter but don’t measure the number of clicks they get. By measuring clicks, you can estimate how many people are interested in your content and products. Not every follower is going to see your link and not every one of them is going to pay it much heed.

Measuring impressions according to the number of followers you have is a grave mistake. Measuring retweets does not give you much information either. People may be reading, clicking and interested but they may not be much of a retweeter (and vice versa).

URL shorteners can be used to measure clicks from Twitter and total clicks on the shortened URL. Even so, the numbers are most of the time not too accurate. It’s best to use web analytics to measure how many views your link destination received from each of your social media referral sites.

4. Neglecting search