Measuring Social Media: How to Determine Your ROI

Are you trying to measure your social media return on investment (ROI)?

Do you need to measure the social performance of your business?

To learn how to determine the ROI for social media marketing, I interview Nichole Kelly for this episode of the Social Media Marketing podcast.
More About This Show

The Social Media Marketing podcast is a show from Social Media Examiner.

It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

The show format is on-demand talk radio (also known as podcasting).

In this episode, I interview Nichole Kelly, author of How to Measure Social Media and the CEO of Social Media Explorer and SME Digital.

Nichole shares why so many businesses struggle to determine the ROI of their social media activities and what's really important in your social media measurement.

You'll learn the most important steps that all marketers should take when thinking about social ROI.

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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Social Media Return on Investment (ROI)
Why so many marketers struggle with measuring social ROI

Nichole believes one of the reasons social ROI is a challenge is because marketers have redefined the metrics used to measure social media. Words such as mentions and retweets are similar to what was measured before. But now people have decided that social media is special, and therefore needs to be measured in a special way.

Nichole believes this has set us up for failure. When you try to 1) justify what you are doing and 2) measure the return, you can't compare these two things. It then becomes difficult to compare and optimize whatever the return is.

People have played with the return on investment phrase in the social realm. For example, you've likely heard of return on influence, return on engagement and return on conversation. The problem with this approach is that at the end of the day, ROI is a financial return. And whether it is the best measure for success of social media doesn't really matter, because it's the measure of success for business.

Listen to the show to find out why you need to translate social media into a positive ROI.

The backstory that led Nichole to social media ROI

Nichole explains how she spent most of her career in corporate marketing and grew up in the boardroom.

In June 2011, there was a study that came out from the Fournaise Report that said 73% of CEOs think marketers lack business credibility. The #1 stated reason was because we talk about trends like social media.

Whether you agree with this or not, Nichole noticed that marketers were caught in a trap of trying to measure social media differently. And measuring social media ROI isn't as hard as everyone was making it out to be.

So she set out to provide how-to information with step-by-step instructions on translating social media into something that can be compared across channels.

Nichole wrote ROI-related articles for Social Media Examiner and discovered there was a never-ending appetite for help figuring out social media ROI.

Nichole thinks people are still trying to understand it completely, but they are actually ready to measure now.

When Nichole first started, a lot of people were talking about measurement in philosophical terms. We are starting to see companies, and marketers in particular, understand that with social media, it doesn't matter how many fans or followers they have.

At the end of the day, if you can compare social media to what you spend on pay-per-click advertising and start measuring it with something simple like cost per click on all of the web traffic you are sending to your site, you have something that justifies a budget.

Listen to the show to find out why Nichole feels measuring social media...