Forge Search Marketing

Social Media Campaigns are About ROI and Engagement, not Traffic

When working with new clients we often find that they are under the impression that their social media campaigns are used to simply propagate their brand and drive traffic to their websites; while this is the case to a certain extent, social media at its core is simply another avenue for advertising and the bottom line of advertising is ROI.

Engagement has commonly been noted by many professionals as the way to measure the success of your Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Buzz, Youtube and other social media accounts, but companies must realize that even if their level of engagement is high, if your are not making any money as a result of your social media presence it isn’t benefiting you as much as another advertising avenue may. Now, don’t confuse this as us saying that engagement and conversation are not important – they most certainly are – but there should come some sort of positive cashflow as a result of the time and money you spend within the social media sphere.

Measuring Social Media Campaign ROI

Naturally the resulting question is, “How do we track our social media ROI?” One of the less complicated methods for companies to utilize are UTM tags. UTM tags allow you to segment your visitors and create specific campaigns within Google Analytics (which is free) and as a result you can track how much of your traffic from your various social media endeavors convert. A practical example would be if you post a link on twitter to a book you wrote and want to see how many people that clicked that link actually bought the book from your site.

By adding the UTM tags to the URL and converting it to a tinyurl, your followers will not only click the link but distribute it to others, who may or may not be on Twitter. Because that UTM tag is attached, your analytics will show that those clicks came as a result of your tweet. Thus, you can check your analytics and see how many of those people purchased the book. From there, you can either measure the ROI manually, or you can setup goals to automatically determine how much you made as a result.

UTM tags are only one way that you can track your social media campaigns’ performance, but we have found that is generally the easiest for companies who are aiming to do it themselves. No matter what you decide to do when it comes to social media, please keep in mind that your time is worth something. If you are spending hours upon hours getting involved in social media, or even paying an agency or consultant to do it on your behalf, make sure that you track the ROI. After all, you wouldn’t run a TV advertisement without seeing how many sales you got from it, would you?