Social media management ROI: tricks and tools

41 percent of all businesses have no clue what their social media return-on-investment (ROI) is right now. Considering the fact that social media management is one of the fastest growing professions in the world, this is shocking.

How can businesses benefit from one of the greatest tools in marketing over the last decade if they do not know how to track it? As a social media management firm, your job is to help companies understand their ROI.

To help you out, here’s a guide for educating your clients on social media management ROI strategies.

Steps to understanding performance

1. Defining your ROI

To do this, you need to ask: why you are on social media? What drove you to use the platform? Are you doing this just because someone told you to? Maybe you did some research and found out it was a good way to get business?

Measuring social media can save you from wasting time on the wrong efforts. When you create goals on social media, you need to be able to pivot and determine the best revenue generating strategies. You measure your results to see what changes to make to your approach.

Determine if your spending on social media can make returns in terms of time and money. It could be increased sales, reduced customer service costs, and/or additional repeat purchases from your current network.

2. Break down costs

You need to determine the costs of being on the social network. You have to figure this out before you create goals, because your budget will directly affect what you can achieve.

As Jay Baer states, “Social media isn’t inexpensive; it’s different expensive. The human effort required to do it right is significant, and not knowing precisely how social media helps your business and how to gauge that progress is a dereliction of duty.”

Here are a few costs your clients should think about with regards to social media services.

• Content creation: Are your clients going to create the content or outsource it to a reputed social media company?
• Community management: The same is true for managing and growing the community. It does not happen magically, but requires the “human effort” Jay Baer mentioned earlier.
• Ads: With Facebook’s organic reach at only 2.6 percent right now, your campaigns may not get traction without paid boosts. The same goes for Twitter and LinkedIn. Ads could be the largest percentage of your social media campaign budget.
• Tools: We’ll discuss some of the tools below. Keep in mind that a number of these tool require an investment. However, they can also save you time and money on the management and content creation side.

3. Defining goals

Helpful tools

Final Thoughts