When it comes to figuring out how to strengthen your business, it’s a good idea to start looking at how efficient your marketing has been and then go from there. For example, a team may use marketing numbers to change up their budgets and small businesses may use numbers to ask for a loan. When it comes to your own small marketing online, social and web metrics can be used to strengthen current marketing campaigns and lay the foundations for new ones in the future.
Another reason to figure out your social media return on your investment (into your business) is to show accountability. Surprisingly, social media work is becoming just as accountable as other parts of a business such as finances, meaning that the Big Bosses (even if it’s just you), has to show that whatever social media campaign is being run is effective.
It’s fairly easy to figure out your Social Media ROI; you can use the same ROI formula you would use in your finances. However, you will have to figure out how much value the socializing has instead of looking at hard dollars and cents.
How to Estimate Your Return
Keep in mind that you will have to estimate your ROI in terms of social media because placing value on social interactions is far harder and that’s ignoring the fact that there are no reliable hard numbers anywhere anyway!
To make a good guess and your social media ROI, you can use this three step process:
- Figure out what your goal is in relation to social media
- Based on this goal, figure out how much you’ve done and what it’s done for you
- Figure out how you want to tie together hard cash with social media.
All of this is only the first step towards figuring out your ROI. From there, you need to use one of three methods to figure out your estimated ROI. Our next article will look at Return on Sales, one of the most straightforward ways to figure out your estimated return on investment.