We live in a world of brand storytelling, emphasizing the importance of brand transparency and authenticity. This means that the return on social media investment isn’t necessarily measured in dollars. Some key performance indicators (KPIs) could be: number of page visits, time spent on application, valence and sentiment of comments, likes, or private endorsements of a brand (a tweet, RT, review, blog post etc.). The more interactivity and conversation between businesses and their consumers in the social media ecosystem, the greater the changes in levels of awareness and organic word-of-mouth marketing. The bottom line is that building meaningful relationships with consumers have long-term payoffs and therefore have to be executed.
When calculating ROI, companies have to first think about the overall marketing objectives and which set of tools with their corresponding metrics will achieve them. Only after that is established can one think about the social channels to utilize.
Below is a table by MIT Sloan Management that organizes relevant metrics for social media applications classified according to key social media applications:
To start testing social media efforts start measuring! A simple dashboard that our professor showed us looks something like this:
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Objective – What is the Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Timely goal |
KPI – the measure of performance that evaluates overall effectiveness |
Channel – Which social media platform(s) is/are used. |
Insight – What was successful? What needs to be changed? How can we improve next time? |
Recipient – Which person is responsible for this objective? |
Action – What are the next steps? |
Additionally, social media conversations should be tracked on a weekly or daily basis, depnding on how large the brand is and the status of the campaign. Such things to track are total mentions, what channels mentions are most prevalent on, the sentiment and whether it is positive or negative, and other interesting observations such as most engaging posts. Furthermore, tracking earned media coverage is just as important because businesses will want to identify influencers, and how to reach their target market.