Measuring Social Media ROI

An Econsultancy report, “The State of Social Media 2011” noted that 41% of marketers surveyed had no return on investment figure for any of the money they had spent on social channels as of October 2011. Further, only 8% could attribute ROI for all their investments in social media.

According to eMarketer:

In 2012, marketers will need to focus more sharply on hard metrics to gauge digital and social marketing ROI. They will be pushed in this direction by economic and competitive forces, and by rising expectations from internal stakeholders who are more interested in the bottom line than in creative experimentation. Up until now, marketers have been content to dabble in digital and social marketing out of curiosity or peer pressure. But as stakes get higher, these media will have to provide concrete business benefits.

We need conversion analytics for social media

As marketers, we need to be able to track social media results for both visitor-to-lead conversion and lead-to-customer conversion, just like we do with other online marketing. Tracking followers and “likes” is no longer sufficent.

One of our standard tools provides this kind of social media tracking, and allows us to compare the performance of various social media channels. We can now see visitor-to-lead conversions as well as lead-to-customer conversions across multiple social media channels.