The article have been taken from http://www.facebook.com/notes/
I just wrote my answer to an ever popular and extremely debatable question posted by @Aji Issac Mathew - How to measure ROI of Social Media - this would definitely be a interesting read for many of you, so here is a copy of the same..
Any social media campaign would have basically two objectives which can be broadly classified into Brand Awareness ( that might not be giving a $$ ROI to measure directly) and then Lead Generation which can be easily attributed a $$ value and ROI measured.
Now if we are looking at the Brand Awareness aspect of it only, there are multiple aspects to be measured in it ( let's take TWITTER as the channel for example)
a)Measure Your Reach :Look at your number of followers and keep a track of the growth month on month. That way you will know how you are doing. If at all you are desperate to attach some monetary value to it, take the cost of reaching a visitor in any of the alternative measurable channels( e.g, Adwords) and apply the cost to your twitter followers. For e.g, If you are paying $0.50 to reach a visitor on Adwords and you have gained 50 new followers on Twitter, you can consider them worth 50x0.30( discounted considering twitter followers are not as targeted as Adwords visitors)=$1
b)Measuring Engagement: Thanks to tools like Radian6 , Biz 360, it is easier to measure engagement this days. But if you are doing it manually you can probably look at the number of times your links were clicked, your message was retweeted, and your hashtag was used and the number of people involved in the activity. In addition, look at @replies and Direct replies if they can be tracked to the campaign.
c)Measuring Influence: This is more about measuring the sentiments you create about your brand. It could be positive, negative or neutral. While there are a lot of tools to do this, it is also wise to manually validate the sentiments time and again.Tools like SocialMention, Twitalyzer are of great help. In addition, try to monitor whom you are able to influence.Ideally your objective should be to engage and influence a mix of big time players and the average Joes.
Similar to Point (A) try to attribute a monetary value to each of your connection and consider the cost of sending a message to them. You can then do your math and get to the ROI.
Now if we are looking at the fourth objective of Lead generation,that would probably not require much explanation. Some easy ways to do it is to use different landing pages for different channels or use tracking URLS. Any decent analytics implementation should be able to track the leads generated through the different social channels and calculating ROI from there is simply a mathematical formula.
One of the most common mistake however is to measure only the direct leads as your social media out put and calculate ROI based on that . Brand awareness is one of the most important and valuable benefits of any social media campaign, and it is important to measure the same while calculating the ROI.
Any social media campaign would have basically two objectives which can be broadly classified into Brand Awareness ( that might not be giving a $$ ROI to measure directly) and then Lead Generation which can be easily attributed a $$ value and ROI measured.
Now if we are looking at the Brand Awareness aspect of it only, there are multiple aspects to be measured in it ( let's take TWITTER as the channel for example)
a)Measure Your Reach :Look at your number of followers and keep a track of the growth month on month. That way you will know how you are doing. If at all you are desperate to attach some monetary value to it, take the cost of reaching a visitor in any of the alternative measurable channels( e.g, Adwords) and apply the cost to your twitter followers. For e.g, If you are paying $0.50 to reach a visitor on Adwords and you have gained 50 new followers on Twitter, you can consider them worth 50x0.30( discounted considering twitter followers are not as targeted as Adwords visitors)=$1
b)Measuring Engagement: Thanks to tools like Radian6 , Biz 360, it is easier to measure engagement this days. But if you are doing it manually you can probably look at the number of times your links were clicked, your message was retweeted, and your hashtag was used and the number of people involved in the activity. In addition, look at @replies and Direct replies if they can be tracked to the campaign.
c)Measuring Influence: This is more about measuring the sentiments you create about your brand. It could be positive, negative or neutral. While there are a lot of tools to do this, it is also wise to manually validate the sentiments time and again.Tools like SocialMention, Twitalyzer are of great help. In addition, try to monitor whom you are able to influence.Ideally your objective should be to engage and influence a mix of big time players and the average Joes.
Similar to Point (A) try to attribute a monetary value to each of your connection and consider the cost of sending a message to them. You can then do your math and get to the ROI.
Now if we are looking at the fourth objective of Lead generation,that would probably not require much explanation. Some easy ways to do it is to use different landing pages for different channels or use tracking URLS. Any decent analytics implementation should be able to track the leads generated through the different social channels and calculating ROI from there is simply a mathematical formula.
One of the most common mistake however is to measure only the direct leads as your social media out put and calculate ROI based on that . Brand awareness is one of the most important and valuable benefits of any social media campaign, and it is important to measure the same while calculating the ROI.
