Want to Know If Your Social Media Strategy Is Profitable? Here’s How

In every strategy, the first step we need to take is to set some goals and what data will serve to track our social media ROI. It’s here where we should stop and think about what we want to achieve with a campaign and why we are choosing to go with a platform over another.

Establish objectives and KPIs

We should have it very clear that in marketing we work with metrics, even when we're talking about brand image or reputation. How are we going to determine whether a campaign was successful if we don't establish figures to meet?

As we said, every action within the marketing department should be related to data, and the data should be taken into consideration to advance and improve the strategy over time. There usually are figures in the department such as the Data Analyst, who with the help of dashboards, can give a vision of how a blog or social media is working. In this case, we recommend you get to know the Google Analytics tool, even if you're not a data expert because, with that knowledge, we’ll be better able to focus our work.

Having some data, such as metadata, lets us track them on a weekly or monthly basis and be able to modify our strategy whether it’s going well or not. We’re talking about for both Paid Media campaigns as well as content and the formats where we offer them. It could be that a moment arrives where the image with copy content format does not render the engagement or visibility results we expected. As we were able to identify it, we're able to improve it just in time with a video or changing the copy. Social media gives us an incredible advantage: being able to modify our campaigns quickly when we choose to do so.

This is where an essential metric comes in: ROI or the Return on Investment. Thanks to this indicator, we can find out how much we’ve invested in carrying out an action and what’s been the benefit stemming from it.

As we’ve seen the beginning of the strategy and why it’s important to measure it, let’s see the primary indicators.

Reach

It's essential to consider reach when it comes to visibility and to find out how many people we can get to thanks to our post. This is a very critical step, but does it tell us how profitable our post is? Does it offer us relevant information on how to take our strategy one way or another?

Having a small reach will inevitably make us take action to find out more, but we should look at other parameters besides followers to determine what we should do.

Web traffic is undoubtedly one of the metrics we should consider. We should monitor users’ steps at all times to find out how they get to our website, where the call-to-action is, and therefore, the conversion.

Social media plays a critical role in this given that it’s where the majority of users are. This is equally applicable to both content and an ad campaign. How are we going to know if the money we spent on a Facebook campaign is bearing fruit if we don’t have data about the number of clicks on the ad?

Google Analytics is a critical tool for this case since it lets us look at the data that’s most relevant to us depending on the goal at hand. We can use it to check how the campaign is fairing and find out if we should modify it or not.

Impressions

In this case, we propose this metric due to the CPM or Cost Per Mille (also known as cost per thousand impressions). Through promoting content on social media, we can pay for the impressions we want to reach, although this metric does not tend to be the reflection of the conversion we obtain. The goal is to make our posts and social media accounts more visible.

Before we carry out an action like this, we should see if our objective is to reach more people. If it is, go ahead. If we want to make the people we already have loyal to us, solely investing in this metric will make us waste time and money.

Interaction

As we saw before, we associate social media with likes, comments, and the times content is shared. These figures say very little, and therefore we should relate them to others. For example, if a post that has 1,000 impressions only has three likes, we can infer that the content has not generated enough engagement.  

We should also see how much users consider the likes, comments, and shares since the number of them calls them to action.

Getting more likes helps our content gain more relevance in the eyes of other users. Comments are precious and are relevant for the reviews; the user looks for the conversation so generating it will help you get to know your target and attract others. Lastly, shares don't help reach more people outside our circle.  

Conversions

We’ve reached the objective that serves as the basis of all our actions. Let’s put our feet back on the ground. It doesn’t matter if a lot of people share your content in the end if you don’t sell your products.

We count on CRO for this goal that lets us track the conversion rate. This metric indicates how many people have carried out a concrete action that we have created content and specific efforts to elicit.

As we have already seen, there are aspects of social media that seem, at first glance, difficult to measure. Nonetheless, if you want your strategy to be well-targeted, you'll need to establish objectives and know what to measure, something that as we’ve seen, is doable thanks to the data and tools we have at our disposal.