Social Measurement - How Do You Track Your ROI? [SURVEY]

Social Measurement – How Do You Track Your ROI? [SURVEY]

If you spend much time chatting about social media marketing then the question of measurement and ROI has surely come up. Are you tracking the benefits that using social media as part of your marketing mix brings? What’s more important: qualitative or quantitative KPIs? How do you put a value on engagement? I’ve heard loads of answers to these questions from a variety of “experts” but am curious to know how you go about measuring your social successes and efforts:

1 – Do you measure the success of your social media marketing?

2 – Do you care if you can tie it to a measurable KPI (like sales)?

3 – Are you more concerned about your reach or the quality of engagement?

4 – What measurement tools do you use?

5 – Are you satisfied that you can justify social media spend?

Would be very interested to hear your thoughts! Please leave answers in the comments section below. If you would prefer to email your response ( we will publish your responses anonymously in the comments section) please feel free – Click Here

If you liked this post, please do share on Twitter >>>Tweet

Enjoying reading The Social Penguin Blog? Why not subscribe to our RSS, follow us on Twitter or join Dave on Facebook.

http://www.contently-managed.com/blog Craig McGill

I wonder if you might have been better served by making this an email answer option as some people might be reluctant to have their answers put to their names publicly.

JenniMaley

Thanks for the feedback Craig, we are looking to have an open discussion around the topic and using the comments is the best way to do this. However, judging by the lack of response, you may be right.
JenniMaley

After your feedback, we’ve added an email option!

http://www.contently-managed.com/blog Craig McGill

Hope that helps!

http://abdallahalhakim.tumblr.com/ Abdallah Al-Hakim

your point 3 regarding reach versus quality of engagement is an important one. I think too many people focus on reach and equate it with quality. The challenge in the future will be measuring quality of engagement – One metric that I am using to measure quality is the degree of participation and engagement on commenting platforms. For this, I have been using engagio to keep track and discover social conversation and the process has been very rewarding (on personal level)

JenniMaley

Thanks for your feedback, Abdallah. You’re right in saying that it’s a challenge to measure the quality. It can be difficult to benchmark and monitor. I haven’t used Engagio personally but will take a look at it.

http://www.contently-managed.com/blog Craig McGill

Answer time!

1 – Do you measure the success of your social media marketing?
For clients, yes. For me, only if I have time.

2 – Do you care if you can tie it to a measurable KPI (like sales)?
Yes, without a financial ROI I worry that businesses may not see the value in what is done, especially in recessionary times. Strangely enough I seem to worry about this more than many of the depts I deal with.

3 – Are you more concerned about your reach or the quality of engagement?
Yes, as every professional should. But then you have that issue of doing a little bit more. As we all know in SM, you can always do a little bit more, link out a little bit more, but all those little bits add up.

4 – What measurement tools do you use?
At the moment, Sprout Social and Google Analytics though I have to say Sprout is severely lacking in some areas of measurement. Tools like Argyll Social I have flirted with but their ROI tracking seems a bit iffy.

5 – Are you satisfied that you can justify social media spend?
In all honesty, no, because I can’t justify ROI. I can justify social media in a million other ways but financial ROI is where it should be in all honesty.

JenniMaley

Hi Craig, thanks for your feedback. I am with you in that I treat my personal and professional accounts differently. I don’t track anything on my personal accounts.

It’s interesting that you say financial ROI is so important as you do still hear the argument that social media marketing is about relationship building and not revenue. It can be really tricky to quantify the value of keeping customers and clients happy.

Sometimes I wish I could merge all the social media tools I use into one so that I could get all the reporting I like from each. If anyone had that API capability then I would hug them!