#to the mutuals with longer urls if you do this and just shorten your url I would not blame you

[time2andspace]

URL Song Game

A song for every letter of your url, and tag the amount of people for the amount of letters in the name

Got tagged by @theaftermathoftheprank

T- Take it Easy by Eagles

I- I'm your Man by Wham!

M- Mary on a Cross by Ghost

E- Everyday by Buddy Holly

2- 21 Guns by Green Day

A- Against the Kitchen Floor by Will Wood

N- No Children by The Mountain Goats

D- Dancing in the Dark by Bruce Springsteen

S- Sad Songs (Say So Much) by Elton John

P- Paradise- George Ezra

A- A teenager in love by Dion & The Belmonts

C- Club Tropicana by Wham!

E- Earth Angel (Will you be mine) by The Penguins

I'll tag @necronomiconenthusiast @tigirl-and-co @evilbubblewrap @mardotmov @asbestostrain @bell-hannah02

[mattinglygleason92]

Since the Web will grow, so does competition for sites. By following the methods in this post, you can keep in front of the competitors. If nobody studies your content, it is useless. This information will provide you with tips to assist increase your site's internet existence.

When putting together your web site for Search engine optimisation in English, take advantage of synonyms for your personal objective key phrase. Search engines in English are generally smart sufficient to acknowledge synonyms and may spot more weight in your web page in case you have a lot more instances of the search term, as you steer clear of the detracting result of key word filling. Publishing posts is a terrific way to broaden your web presence. When you submit articles, you enhance your google search exposure, which, therefore, brings more visitors in your site. Furthermore, the posts that you just post also help advise your shoppers relating to your merchandise in a fashion that can get you more consumers in the long run. Even though search engines like google may find your web site by themselves if the content is pertinent, you need to nonetheless submit your web site to varied search engines like yahoo to ensure they're finding specifically what you wish those to see. Guide syndication gives you a lot more control during this process, and that's what you need being a marketing expert. Whenever you compose an article that may be Search engine marketing pleasant, be sure you do not forget to make it enjoyable to read, also. Who knows that will run into your post and this will mirror badly upon you as an author and marketer, if your part reads like directly, Search engine marketing junk e-mail. Should your internet site gives a local assistance, you should utilize the label from the location that you assist among keywords. For example, use "our Minneapolis pizzas" rather than merely "our pizza." This will make it simpler for those who are living within your certain industry to locate your blog. Keep display and frames to a minimum on your own web site. They can look pretty, however are awful for search engine optimization and engines can't decode them effortlessly. When you have to use flash, make sure to also include links or keywords at the base of the internet pages. Don't do any longer Search engine optimization until you have internet statistics set up. You require website analytics application to enable you to evidently see which Search engine optimisation approaches work and that happen to be not worth your time and effort. Without it software program, you will struggle to optimize your Search engine marketing outcomes and can squander a great deal of useful time and cash on methods that don't provide any final results. You need to contemplate this subsequent concern "Just how can an individual discover this site if he or she is looking for it?" When you solution this, you have to utilize your response as the keywords, and spread every one of them close to your blog. You need to consist of key phrases throughout your articles as well as in your titles even so, don't excessive use them, or perhaps you work the chance of obtaining your web site regarded as to get junk e-mail. Select the best Website url shorteners. You want to ensure that the internet search engine nevertheless gets credit to find you, however, many Web address shortening businesses do not allow that to occur. Look for the proper types that provide credit where by it is due, along with your internet search engine will thanks. Use good quality key phrases to further improve your web site reaches. Placing keywords and phrases in places much like the title tag and webpage header will permit your web site to be visible on much more lookups. Be careful not to go crazy, however. Search engine listings seek out excessive or worthless search phrases and symbol the site as spammy. Find out about the several types of additional back links that may increase your sites search engine results. Car tinting are mutual hyperlinks, listing links, paid one particular-way hyperlinks and normal one particular-way hyperlinks. Search engines like yahoo ranking every one of these links differently, so become knowledgeable on the advantages and disadvantages of every before beginning your additional weblink strategy. Include your keywords towards the anchor text of the integrated backlinks. Backlinks are an additional piece that search engines like google rank higher in value than standard text message. The greater spots of significance on the engine which you placed your search term, the higher they will likely worth those words in identifying where your site must be in the rankings. As you have seen, search engine marketing is actually a highly customizable and cheap strategy for marketing your organization on the internet. With regular time purchase, this process is fairly very easy to begin, and requires only moderate upkeep. You will be grateful you followed these suggestions as soon as your internet site visitors selections up!

[ironwolf-gone]

Tag game!!

Thank you for tagging me hon! @mylastvow

Why did you choose your url?

Probaly cause I like wolves and robots, the gone part idk

Any side blogs?

I have three other side blogs. One for dogs and nature, one for writing and one for teenage muntant ninja turtles (tho tbh i might get rid of the tmnt one)

How long have you been on tumblr?

Oh god longer than i care to admit... since July 2013

Do you have a queue tag?

I don't, BUT I have do a have a tag for when i rant in tags. it's the letter B (I’ll tag it if any one is curious)

Why did you start your blog in the first place?

One of my old friends told me about tumblr and that was that. I’ve been stuck here since

Why did you choose your icon/pfp?

Idk i just felt like using a picrew icon of me for now

Why did you choose your header?

I assume you mean the header image on my blog, if so right now it's just Yelena from Black Widow which I saw last month and fell in love with her so yeah

What’s your post with the most notes?

It was actually a Red Vs Blue headcannon/meta analysis I did like three years ago

How many mutuals do you have?

Uhhhh 40 ish

How many followers do you have?

500 something

How many people do you follow?

270

Have you ever made a shit post?

More than likely

How often do you use tumblr a day?

More than I care to admit

Did you ever have a fight/argument with another blog?

Nope! I mean unless I know the person and it’s in good fun, I don’t like to legit argue

How do you feel about the ‘you need to reblog’ posts?

Some, unfortunatly it's the ones where they're 'if you don't reblog this you'll have bad luck for three days!' or some shit

Do you like tag games?

Yes I do! I love them!

Do you like ask games?

Absolutely! (Seriously never ever think ‘oh she won’t want to do this/be tagged in this’ yes the fuck I will)

Which of your mutuals do you think is tumblr famous?

I'm sure there's a few but I don't really remember blog name all that well. I go off icon's or a shortened version of their url

Do you have a crush on a mutual?

Nope

Tags!

@tobemadeofglass @hopefulstarfire

@callmeshaq @livrere-green @doilooklikeiknoworcare

[feitanswife]

Sorry for the fucking essay but no actually I’m not

So I saw a buzzfeed story article on snap and it was from a hashtag on twitter that was trending a few days back, #igotwokewhen or something to that effect.

And it reminded me of something that would be WAY too long of a story for twitter.

Well, several somethings. Three to be exact. This was like a two year process that only sort of included tumblr.

So it started in my sophomore year of high school (10th grade, I was... turning 16 that coming March) and I was in Honors 10th Grade English with the rest of the tryhards.

(Honors didn’t really mean anything in the grand scheme of things, the classes were relatively similar to core, it was basically a box you checked during class selection to say “I want to be in a class with people who give a shit”)

And I was in a corner with two other kids: the one I’ll call Cake Face, and her best friend, Cutie. (Cause they were cute. Like adorable non-threatening videogame-nerd-who-even-I-could-drop-kick-if-they-tried-anything cute, which was very much my “type” in high school as I was in complete and utter denial about my lack of sexual attraction and only let myself grow close to people I could totally take in a fight to ease my anxiety about being touched.)

Cake Face was a terrifying girl who very Clearly had a tumblr.

This was 2014-2015. She Very Clearly Had A Tumblr.™️ like it was Scary.

She sat behind me and she terrified me. I’d known her from 7th grade onwards and until that point I knew 3 things about her: she wore WAY too much makeup, she was a try hard at school, and she hated pretty much everyone.

Except Cutie, who she would kill and die for.

Cutie, whose real name I can’t even remember now, was the first out trans peer I remember having. (I say “out” because two of my best friends who is known for much longer came out later, but at the time to my knowledge Cutie was the only one so I count them as first cause it was my first interaction under the pretense)

Cutie was also the first non-binary person I knew. That is without condition, to my knowledge (I haven’t kept track of many people from high school) as the next notable encounter was well into college.

So now you had me, vaguely crushing on Cutie whose Overbearingly Agressively Supportive best friend sat right behind me.

Needless to say that crush went nowhere, we hardly talked cause I was too afraid of Cake Face to even start up a coversation for fear I’d say something wrong and get my head ripped off. She was openly confrontational with our teacher and the rest of the class and I just kept my head down and said nothing.

Come to think of it, that’s probably what Cutie was doing too. I certainly wouldn’t want my best friend fighting people on my behalf all day. Talk about embarrassing.

But the idea had been put in my head and since I was about ankle deep in Fandom Tumblr that that point (mostly popular anime with some J-fashion on the side) I decided to dip my toes in further.

And while I was still wrapping my head around the vague idea of asexuality and oh no what does this mean for the boyfriend I got last spring my near best friend in the world cane out as a trans guy on like, day one of our AP language and composition class.

Just to me and our mutual friend but like, it happened. The name he ended up choosing could be shortened to a rather gener neutral nickname so he ended up going by that at large, but the actual conversation only happened with us.

(To be fair, his deadname when combined with his middle name was a weed based pun so no one was surprised he changed it. it was also spelled weirdly.)

And that was the first time I’d ever like, fully integrated into the... entire culture of interacting??? I guess??? Like learning the lingo, learning the flags, figuring out what a binder was (and trying to talk him out of wearing it to gym class, irresponsible little shit!) and I quickly became very protective of him.

I mean I was protective before cause he had other problems like anxiety worse than mine and we all know that when a group of friends all have anxiety that whoever’s is currently least active gets to pretend they’re fine and deal with shit. But this was a whole other layer. It honestly made me a little paranoid cause people... people show their true colors at times like these.

Like that second friend he told.

“Friend”

I ended up writing her into a novel just to hit her character with a truck over one (1) conversation.

Cause when my friend was around she was a sweet angel.

But when he wasn’t she was rude as shit and misgendered him constantly. Also she was really jealous of me being better at essay writing than her and like well maybe if you focused more effort into class and less into talking shit about your supposed best friend then??? Maybe you’d know how to write???

And I worked my ass off on a group poster project and she threw it out and redid the whole thing herself cause she didn’t like mine and it’s been like four years and I have never forgiven her for that I had like three panic attacks for that poster and you threw it away?

I’m not even gonna censor her name Fuck You Jillian you entitled piece of shit!

And around that time I also met the most important person of my life.

She’s a year younger than me and three times as smart, she’s still my best friend to this day and all of our friends unironically call her mom.

And she was the first person I came out to as ace.

(Mostly because she did first and the only response I could think of was “me too!” We were eating lunch. I think I was sitting on the floor. She was on a bench. I was looking up at her. Her hair was bright fire engine red and down to her butt and she was in full gothwear.)

It was because of her that I eventually made a new tumblr account (first under lily-of-the-rain, then raininglillies, then Feitanswife which I have no interest in changing cause I can’t fathom anyone else having this url) and sort of dove deep into all of this cause I finally felt like I could.

Like she was the full permission to exist in this space! She ran our high schools GSA and now is Vice President of our college’s Queer and Allues club (which I only joined cause she dragged me)

and all of that while being ace, which I was ultimately horrifically ashamed of until I met her.

Not because I thought it was wrong to be ace, I just thought it made me less important. Just in general. I was less important in the straight world and less important among the lgbtq+ community. No one was gonna make a fuss over me if I just sat down and shut up, but I wasn’t going to be missed if I disappeared either.

I was just what I’d always been, a background character. Meant to be seen and not heard. Don’t make a fuss just sit and be quiet and be glad we saved you a chair at all.

But she wasn’t. She walked in and it didn’t matter if it was a night out or 7 am on a Tuesday she was dressed to the nines, with her nearly neon red hair and a sort of “DONT fuck with me” energy that let her just mow down anyone who wanted to start shit, with her or anyone else.

And people respected her not in spite of who she was but because of it

And that was the final flip of the switch I needed. First it was the awareness, then the caring personal connection, and then there was “you have the right and the duty to flip that fucking switch. It is yours.

Not because someone else told you to or because it affects people you care about, but because it affect you

[chocolvte]

tagged game.

omfg okay so i literally was tagged in this WEEKS ago by my fav @milkdoie but i FORGOT about it completely i’m so sorry! but here she is

no. 01 why did you choose your url?

it used to be different, when i first joined tumblr and since then i just shortened it to chocolvte, which i love <3

no. 02 any side blogs? if so, name them and say why you have them.

i will NOT be naming them, but i have two side blogs and i just use them for other groups that i like that i want to focus on more than i do here if that makes sense lol

no. 03 how long have you been on tumblr?

oh my gosh it’s been a while. i think i might have joined in 2016, but it could have been 2017 so somewhere around five years!

no. 04 do you have a queue tag?

i don’t and i don’t think i’d make one because i don’t think i use it enough for it to be necessary you know?

no. 05 why did you start your blog in the first place?

i honestly can’t remember anymore since it’s been so long, but i think it was probably to read and write harry potter fan fiction (this is humiliating for me to admit so please be gentle lmao)

no. 06 why did you choose your icon/pfp?

it’s from joy’s instagram! she’s been posting the CUTEST pics lately and this one fit the green vibe i’ve been feeling lately

no. 07 why did you choose your header?

this picture of her also came from her instagram and again was just too cute not to use on this blog lol

no. 08 what’s your post with the most notes?

okay wait i forget how to check this but i think it’s a (and remember that this is the part where you’re obligated to go easy on me) hufflepuff x slytherin headcanon post 🥴

no. 09 how many mutuals do you have?

i’m not sure how you check this, but not too many! prob between five and ten i think, but i’m always open to be mutuals with someone when i feel like we would vibe you know?

no. 10 how many followers do you have?

11,917 and i truly cannot express how grateful i am for you all <3

no. 11 how many people do you follow?

68 because i recently did a cleanse and unfollowed all of the blogs that no longer feel relevant or bring me joy

on a related note: i absolutely love social media cleanses! they feel so nice and i truly could not recommend them more lol

no. 12 have you ever made a shitpost?

omg yes i definitely have. i’m always just saying whatever lol

no. 13 how many times do you use tumblr a day?

it depends on the day! sometimes i don’t use it at all and on other days, i’m on it constantly lol. it just depends on my mood.

no. 14 have you ever argued with another blog before? who won?

omg no i don’t think so. i feel so lucky that my experience on tumblr has been so positive so far. i’ve had a few rude anons, but i’ve never had a fight with another blog before!

no. 15 how do you feel about “you need to compare this” posts?

i have no idea what this means LMAO i’m so sorry

no. 16 do you like tag games?

YES. the narcissist in me LOVES thrives on these so please never stop tagging me in them lmao they’re so entertaining

no. 17 do you like ask games?

also yes! i especially love when you guys send in your answers along with questions and stuff. it makes me so happy :)

no. 18 which of your mutuals do you consider to be tumblr famous?

ooh i’m not sure? i have lots of super talented, popular mutuals but i have no idea how much of a following any of them have so i don’t know. they’re all famous in my heart 😌

no. 19 do you have a crush on a mutual?

nope! bestie vibes only all around and i like it that way lol

whew well that was kind of a lot LOL now i’m going to tag @minheeology and @markofjaehyun if either of you are interested <3

[curiousthimble]

I've been tagged by @elveny, thank you ♥

Tagging @musetta3, @wardenari, @rpgwrites, @noire-pandora, @dalish-rogue, @blarfkey, @queen-kass-the-writer, and all who want to grab it ♥

1: Why did you choose your url?

It's the silly walkie name my stage director gave me after I complained about being called "pinhead" over the walkie-talkies. Better than my counterparts "light-kid" and "dirtbag." Mostly it got shortened to "thimble," but if you got a walkie name, you were a gold-star crew member.

2: Any side blogs? if you have them, name them and why you have them.

Yeah, I play around on Bellesbookandshadows now and again, but I mostly just use it to collect interesting occult/witchcraft stuff.

3: How long have you been on tumblr?

hmm....September 13, 2011.

4: Do you have a queue tag?

No. I do run a queue 90% of the time, which is why nothing is ever tagged because I'm a horrible human being. Chaos reigns here.

5: Why did you start your blog in the first place?

I had been in the hospital for two days and was REALLY bored so I downloaded that app I'd been hearing about.

6: Why did you choose your icon/pfp?

I LOVE this picture! It's my OC Hera and her mabari Ares. @/TobioFish on Instagram painted it for me and I'm just in love with it.

7: Why did you choose your header?

I don't even know what it is. Which means I should probably change it.

8: What’s your post with the most notes?

I...I have no idea.

9: How many mutuals do you have?

Again, I have no idea. People keep up with that?

10: How many followers do you have?

1102. I'm sure most of them are abandoned by now, but there are a few names I remember from the years gone by.

11: How many people do you follow?

294. I tend to unfollow blogs that are no longer active after 6 months.

12: Have you ever made a shitpost?

no

13: How often do you use tumblr each day?

Several times a day. It's honestly my main social media site.

14: Did you ever have a fight/argument with another blog once? who won?

Um. No. I've gotten hate mail a handful of times and I literally just block and go.

15: How do you feel about “you need to reblog this” posts?

I try to ignore them.

16: Do you like tag games?

Yes!

17: Do you like ask games?

(taking Elveny's answer here because...well, she's right.) I do! Especially those asking about my OCs, I love thinking about them and fleshing them out this way! :D And when ppl ask about them, I feel like they are interesting to others too which is the best feeling. ♥

19: Do you have a crush on a mutual?

No.

[christinesumpmg]

Social Media ROI: How to Prove Your Efforts Are Paying Off

One of the most difficult parts of social media marketing is actually proving its ROI. It’s easy to throw numbers around – likes, new followers, comments and so on – but how do you actually prove your return on investment from social media? 

How do you demonstrate that your work is bringing in revenue or helping the brand reach its marketing and business objectives? 

In this post, I’m going to share some of my best and most effective tips, tricks and tools to help prove your social media ROI. Let’s go.

Vanity Metrics vs. Actionable Metrics: What’s the Difference?

“Vanity metrics” is a term that’s thrown around a lot, but what does it actually mean in the context of social media marketing, and how is it relevant to measuring and proving your ROI?

What Are Vanity Metrics?

Vanity metrics, as the name suggests, are metrics that might make you feel good about yourself – such as generating a bunch of likes on an update or having a large number of fans and followers – but if the metrics aren’t actually relevant to your specific social media marketing objectives (usually, the one’s management or clients ask for), then they are simply vanity metrics. They might look good on paper (or that PDF report you have to send regularly), but in the grand scheme of things, they don’t really matter much to the bottom line. 

Or, another way to look at vanity metrics is as metrics that don’t show a direct ROI, such as clicks, traffic and conversions made, which are “actionable metrics”. 

This isn’t to say that followers, likes, comments and so on aren’t important or relevant. In fact, depending on what your marketing objectives are, they might even be the most relevant stats you have. But in most cases, businesses care much more about results that they can actually understand from their point of view: a surge in traffic to their website, people signing up to their , social media fans buying their products or services or inquiring about them and so on. 

Because of this, the way you prove your social media ROI, depends on your objectives:

For objectives like brand awareness, engagement and so on, you can prove ROI simply by reaching objectives (for example, if your objective is to generate 200 new followers in 30 days, then you’ve proven ROI by reaching that goal). Alternatively, you can also assign these types of metrics a certain value. For example, a new follower might be worth $5, while a like could be worth $1.

For quantifiable objectives like conversions and sales made, you can be much more accurate about actual return on investment, as conversions and sales have a much clearer monetary value 

How to Establish Your Social Media Marketing Objectives

Whatever your directive is – and what results you’re supposed to achieve – you should always establish clear objectives beforehand and run them by your manager or client. The clearer you are about this from the start, the easier it will be to prove ROI and avoid any misunderstandings. 

The SMART goal-setting template works perfectly in this situation:

Be specific about what you want to achieve, down to the last detail

Make sure your goal is measurable and you know what KPIs you need to track so that you can actually prove your ROI 

Consider your goal carefully to make sure it’s actually attainable and you’re not shooting too high, which will mean you likely won’t be able to prove your ROI (consult your past analytics and results and use your gut instinct to ascertain whether a goal is truly attainable or not) 

Any social media objective should be relevant to that businesses’ marketing objectives – if the brand wants to raise awareness of their company, then your social media goals should reflect that

And finally, every goal should be time-bound – in other words — it needs a deadline! 

In short, SMART stands for:

Specific

Measurable

Attainable 

Relevant

And time-bound 

Establish your KPIs

As I mentioned before, one of the essential aspects of a good objective is that it needs to be measurable. 

Once you’ve set an objective and decided that it is in fact, measurable, you should also take the time to establish the exact KPIs you’ll need to monitor in order to prove the success of your objective. Below is a list of the most important and relevant social media KPIs: 

Engagement: likes, comments, shares and retweets and so on

Reach

Traffic back to website/landing page

Conversions made: people signing up for a list

Leads generated 

When your campaign starts, you should also start carefully tracking the relevant KPIs to monitor your performance and optimize it as you go along. Plus, it will help you measure your social media success.

Here are 3 useful social media tools to help you track these KPIs and prove your social media ROI: 1. Google Analytics & the Google Campaign URL Builder

Google Analytics can be one of your best friends when it comes to proving social media ROI. It can track what your social media traffic is doing on your website, as well as tell you how many conversions you’ve generated. 

To start leveraging Google Analytics to its full potential, make sure to create relevant conversion goals first. You can set up to 20 different conversion goals by going to Admin and clicking on Goals:

Set up different conversion goals in the Google Analytics admin.

As you can see above, you have multiple options for templates so that you can measure all kinds of conversions:

Making a reservation or an appointment

Buying or paying for something

Signing up for your email list

Checking out your contact page

Playing a certain media, and more 

Select the template you want to use (although you can also start from scratch) and follow the instructions to set up your conversion goals. As I mentioned earlier, you’re not allowed unlimited goals, so you might have to replace older ones that are no longer relevant whenever you have a new goal to track (like a new service you’re offering, or a different email list). 

Once you’ve created your goals, you’ll be able to track them for all of your traffic including, of course, your social media traffic. 

Then, when you head over to check your social media traffic in Google Analytics, you’ll also see a conversion rate for each of your social networks which will help you understand the quality of your traffic and help you focus on the social networks that drive results. 

Better yet, you’ll be able to see actual ROI from social media conversions. However, in order to have this information, you need give your conversion goals a monetary value when you set them up. For example, an email sign up might be worth $10, while buying something from you could be the average product or service price. 

Another way to leverage Google Analytics is to use UTM tracking links on your social media – you can create them using the Google Campaign URL Builder:

Create your tracking URLs with Google Campaign URL Builder.

Using UTM tracking links will allow you to really narrow down your findings, much more so than Google Analytics can on its own. For example, you can see which Facebook groups brought the most traffic or what kind of results a specific social media campaign brought in (traffic, conversions, etc.). 

Once you’ve set up these tracking links and started using them, you can track them in your Google Analytics account, under Acquisition – Campaigns. 

2. Agorapulse

Agorapulse has several useful features for tracking social media ROI and success, beyond the usual social media analytics: 

A social media ROI calculator for Facebook Pages

A built-in UTM link builder with dynamic features

First, let’s look at the ROI calculator. The tool uses 3 metrics to help determine an accurate ROI:

The number of engaged fans

The impressions you’ve generated

And the link clicks you got on your Page

The tool starts out with default values for each ($1/€1 for an engaged fan, $5/€5 for impressions and $1/€1 for clicks); it syncs its data on a daily basis and automatically generates your ROI value, broken down as seen in the screenshot below:

That said, you can always customize the monetary values for each in order to more accurately report your results: 

Discuss these values with clients/managers/etc. to come to a mutual agreement over the value of these metrics and you’ll then be able to automatically generate a Page’s ROI any time you need it. All that’s left to do is keep an eye on your results so you can change up your social media strategy when needed if you’re not getting enough positive results. 

Beyond that, you also have access to social media analytics for multiple major social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.), as well as the ability to export your reports. That said, the feature that I most want to talk about is the built-in UTM builder; this option will appear every time you upload a new update with a link:

Once you turn on UTM tracking, you can customize the parameters to your liking and even add extra parameters beyond the usual suspects (source, medium and campaign). And like before, you can track the results with your web analytics. 

This feature will allow you to easily add UTM tracking links (and shorten them automatically if you’ve also connected your Bit.ly account) to each and every link you share; even better, if you’re sharing a link to multiple networks and want to save quite a bit of time, you can select the “Dynamic” option under “Type” and Agorapulse will automatically select the correct social network, medium and profile and them to each UTM link.

To sum up, you can use these UTM tracking links in a variety of ways, when it comes to measuring your results (as they are also excellent tools for testing your social media):

To see where exactly your traffic is coming from (not just the social network as a whole but specific traffic sources, such as groups, updates and so on) 

To see exactly how many conversions you’ve generated and what your ROI is from these conversions (but, as I mentioned before, you also need to set up the right conversion goals in Google Analytics) 

Beyond that, you can get creative and use them in other ways too. For example, bra company Brayola often uses shortened UTM links whenever they direct people to their products, sales, offers, etc. within ad comments:

This way, they’re not just tracking results from the actual ad, but also from any comments happening. After all, it’s still an ROI from social media and by using the UTM links they can actually track to see if that comment helped them make a conversion or sale. 

3. Cyfe

As you might recall from earlier, it’s good practice to monitor your social media KPIs all the time, in order to optimize your campaigns on the go – with the goal of improving your results so that you can reach your objectives.

You can do so very easily with a business dashboard such as Cyfe. Basically, it’s a dashboard that you can connect to your social media analytics (Twitter Analytics, Facebook Insights, etc.) and use it to constantly monitor the KPIs you want. 

You can pull data from your social networks by using their pre-built widgets; click on “add widget” and then on Social Media to see what options you have:

As you can see, you can track pretty much any major social network (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, etc.), as well as your Bit.ly shares and clicks and Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook ads. 

Once you’ve taken the time to set it up, all you have to do is log into your dashboard to see how your results are evolving – use it not just to monitor these results, but also to help you put together your ROI and social media reports, using the data provided for the relevant social network.

Conclusion

With the right tools at your disposal and a strategy put in place to help you calculate your ROI, measuring your social media success doesn’t have to be the challenging feat that it might appear at the first sight. All you have to do is remember the steps you need to take in order to accurately measure your ROI:

Setting SMART objectives for your social media campaigns and strategies

Establishing what KPIs you’ll need to track in order to measure your objectives’ success

Clarifying what conversions you need to focus on and setting up the right conversion goals in Google Analytics

Leveraging useful tools to help you track your social media metrics and KPIs and calculate your ROI

What are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced when having to prove social media ROI? What is your strategy like and what types of tools do you use?   

The post Social Media ROI: How to Prove Your Efforts Are Paying Off appeared first on Convince and Convert: Social Media Consulting and Content Marketing Consulting.

http://bit.ly/2FibM6b

[dainiaolivahm]

Social Media ROI: How to Prove Your Efforts Are Paying Off

One of the most difficult parts of social media marketing is actually proving its ROI. It’s easy to throw numbers around – likes, new followers, comments and so on – but how do you actually prove your return on investment from social media? 

How do you demonstrate that your work is bringing in revenue or helping the brand reach its marketing and business objectives? 

In this post, I’m going to share some of my best and most effective tips, tricks and tools to help prove your social media ROI. Let’s go.

Vanity Metrics vs. Actionable Metrics: What’s the Difference?

“Vanity metrics” is a term that’s thrown around a lot, but what does it actually mean in the context of social media marketing, and how is it relevant to measuring and proving your ROI?

What Are Vanity Metrics?

Vanity metrics, as the name suggests, are metrics that might make you feel good about yourself – such as generating a bunch of likes on an update or having a large number of fans and followers – but if the metrics aren’t actually relevant to your specific social media marketing objectives (usually, the one’s management or clients ask for), then they are simply vanity metrics. They might look good on paper (or that PDF report you have to send regularly), but in the grand scheme of things, they don’t really matter much to the bottom line. 

Or, another way to look at vanity metrics is as metrics that don’t show a direct ROI, such as clicks, traffic and conversions made, which are “actionable metrics”. 

This isn’t to say that followers, likes, comments and so on aren’t important or relevant. In fact, depending on what your marketing objectives are, they might even be the most relevant stats you have. But in most cases, businesses care much more about results that they can actually understand from their point of view: a surge in traffic to their website, people signing up to their , social media fans buying their products or services or inquiring about them and so on. 

Because of this, the way you prove your social media ROI, depends on your objectives:

For objectives like brand awareness, engagement and so on, you can prove ROI simply by reaching objectives (for example, if your objective is to generate 200 new followers in 30 days, then you’ve proven ROI by reaching that goal). Alternatively, you can also assign these types of metrics a certain value. For example, a new follower might be worth $5, while a like could be worth $1.

For quantifiable objectives like conversions and sales made, you can be much more accurate about actual return on investment, as conversions and sales have a much clearer monetary value 

How to Establish Your Social Media Marketing Objectives

Whatever your directive is – and what results you’re supposed to achieve – you should always establish clear objectives beforehand and run them by your manager or client. The clearer you are about this from the start, the easier it will be to prove ROI and avoid any misunderstandings. 

The SMART goal-setting template works perfectly in this situation:

Be specific about what you want to achieve, down to the last detail

Make sure your goal is measurable and you know what KPIs you need to track so that you can actually prove your ROI 

Consider your goal carefully to make sure it’s actually attainable and you’re not shooting too high, which will mean you likely won’t be able to prove your ROI (consult your past analytics and results and use your gut instinct to ascertain whether a goal is truly attainable or not) 

Any social media objective should be relevant to that businesses’ marketing objectives – if the brand wants to raise awareness of their company, then your social media goals should reflect that

And finally, every goal should be time-bound – in other words — it needs a deadline! 

In short, SMART stands for:

Specific

Measurable

Attainable 

Relevant

And time-bound 

Establish your KPIs

As I mentioned before, one of the essential aspects of a good objective is that it needs to be measurable. 

Once you’ve set an objective and decided that it is in fact, measurable, you should also take the time to establish the exact KPIs you’ll need to monitor in order to prove the success of your objective. Below is a list of the most important and relevant social media KPIs: 

Engagement: likes, comments, shares and retweets and so on

Reach

Traffic back to website/landing page

Conversions made: people signing up for a list

Leads generated 

When your campaign starts, you should also start carefully tracking the relevant KPIs to monitor your performance and optimize it as you go along. Plus, it will help you measure your social media success.

Here are 3 useful social media tools to help you track these KPIs and prove your social media ROI: 1. Google Analytics & the Google Campaign URL Builder

Google Analytics can be one of your best friends when it comes to proving social media ROI. It can track what your social media traffic is doing on your website, as well as tell you how many conversions you’ve generated. 

To start leveraging Google Analytics to its full potential, make sure to create relevant conversion goals first. You can set up to 20 different conversion goals by going to Admin and clicking on Goals:

Set up different conversion goals in the Google Analytics admin.

As you can see above, you have multiple options for templates so that you can measure all kinds of conversions:

Making a reservation or an appointment

Buying or paying for something

Signing up for your email list

Checking out your contact page

Playing a certain media, and more 

Select the template you want to use (although you can also start from scratch) and follow the instructions to set up your conversion goals. As I mentioned earlier, you’re not allowed unlimited goals, so you might have to replace older ones that are no longer relevant whenever you have a new goal to track (like a new service you’re offering, or a different email list). 

Once you’ve created your goals, you’ll be able to track them for all of your traffic including, of course, your social media traffic. 

Then, when you head over to check your social media traffic in Google Analytics, you’ll also see a conversion rate for each of your social networks which will help you understand the quality of your traffic and help you focus on the social networks that drive results. 

Better yet, you’ll be able to see actual ROI from social media conversions. However, in order to have this information, you need give your conversion goals a monetary value when you set them up. For example, an email sign up might be worth $10, while buying something from you could be the average product or service price. 

Another way to leverage Google Analytics is to use UTM tracking links on your social media – you can create them using the Google Campaign URL Builder:

Create your tracking URLs with Google Campaign URL Builder.

Using UTM tracking links will allow you to really narrow down your findings, much more so than Google Analytics can on its own. For example, you can see which Facebook groups brought the most traffic or what kind of results a specific social media campaign brought in (traffic, conversions, etc.). 

Once you’ve set up these tracking links and started using them, you can track them in your Google Analytics account, under Acquisition – Campaigns. 

2. Agorapulse

Agorapulse has several useful features for tracking social media ROI and success, beyond the usual social media analytics: 

A social media ROI calculator for Facebook Pages

A built-in UTM link builder with dynamic features

First, let’s look at the ROI calculator. The tool uses 3 metrics to help determine an accurate ROI:

The number of engaged fans

The impressions you’ve generated

And the link clicks you got on your Page

The tool starts out with default values for each ($1/€1 for an engaged fan, $5/€5 for impressions and $1/€1 for clicks); it syncs its data on a daily basis and automatically generates your ROI value, broken down as seen in the screenshot below:

That said, you can always customize the monetary values for each in order to more accurately report your results: 

Discuss these values with clients/managers/etc. to come to a mutual agreement over the value of these metrics and you’ll then be able to automatically generate a Page’s ROI any time you need it. All that’s left to do is keep an eye on your results so you can change up your social media strategy when needed if you’re not getting enough positive results. 

Beyond that, you also have access to social media analytics for multiple major social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.), as well as the ability to export your reports. That said, the feature that I most want to talk about is the built-in UTM builder; this option will appear every time you upload a new update with a link:

Once you turn on UTM tracking, you can customize the parameters to your liking and even add extra parameters beyond the usual suspects (source, medium and campaign). And like before, you can track the results with your web analytics. 

This feature will allow you to easily add UTM tracking links (and shorten them automatically if you’ve also connected your Bit.ly account) to each and every link you share; even better, if you’re sharing a link to multiple networks and want to save quite a bit of time, you can select the “Dynamic” option under “Type” and Agorapulse will automatically select the correct social network, medium and profile and them to each UTM link.

To sum up, you can use these UTM tracking links in a variety of ways, when it comes to measuring your results (as they are also excellent tools for testing your social media):

To see where exactly your traffic is coming from (not just the social network as a whole but specific traffic sources, such as groups, updates and so on) 

To see exactly how many conversions you’ve generated and what your ROI is from these conversions (but, as I mentioned before, you also need to set up the right conversion goals in Google Analytics) 

Beyond that, you can get creative and use them in other ways too. For example, bra company Brayola often uses shortened UTM links whenever they direct people to their products, sales, offers, etc. within ad comments:

This way, they’re not just tracking results from the actual ad, but also from any comments happening. After all, it’s still an ROI from social media and by using the UTM links they can actually track to see if that comment helped them make a conversion or sale. 

3. Cyfe

As you might recall from earlier, it’s good practice to monitor your social media KPIs all the time, in order to optimize your campaigns on the go – with the goal of improving your results so that you can reach your objectives.

You can do so very easily with a business dashboard such as Cyfe. Basically, it’s a dashboard that you can connect to your social media analytics (Twitter Analytics, Facebook Insights, etc.) and use it to constantly monitor the KPIs you want. 

You can pull data from your social networks by using their pre-built widgets; click on “add widget” and then on Social Media to see what options you have:

As you can see, you can track pretty much any major social network (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, etc.), as well as your Bit.ly shares and clicks and Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook ads. 

Once you’ve taken the time to set it up, all you have to do is log into your dashboard to see how your results are evolving – use it not just to monitor these results, but also to help you put together your ROI and social media reports, using the data provided for the relevant social network.

Conclusion

With the right tools at your disposal and a strategy put in place to help you calculate your ROI, measuring your social media success doesn’t have to be the challenging feat that it might appear at the first sight. All you have to do is remember the steps you need to take in order to accurately measure your ROI:

Setting SMART objectives for your social media campaigns and strategies

Establishing what KPIs you’ll need to track in order to measure your objectives’ success

Clarifying what conversions you need to focus on and setting up the right conversion goals in Google Analytics

Leveraging useful tools to help you track your social media metrics and KPIs and calculate your ROI

What are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced when having to prove social media ROI? What is your strategy like and what types of tools do you use?   

The post Social Media ROI: How to Prove Your Efforts Are Paying Off appeared first on Convince and Convert: Social Media Consulting and Content Marketing Consulting.

http://bit.ly/2FibM6b

[maryhare96]

Social Media ROI: How to Prove Your Efforts Are Paying Off

One of the most difficult parts of social media marketing is actually proving its ROI. It’s easy to throw numbers around – likes, new followers, comments and so on – but how do you actually prove your return on investment from social media? 

How do you demonstrate that your work is bringing in revenue or helping the brand reach its marketing and business objectives? 

In this post, I’m going to share some of my best and most effective tips, tricks and tools to help prove your social media ROI. Let’s go.

Vanity Metrics vs. Actionable Metrics: What’s the Difference?

“Vanity metrics” is a term that’s thrown around a lot, but what does it actually mean in the context of social media marketing, and how is it relevant to measuring and proving your ROI?

What Are Vanity Metrics?

Vanity metrics, as the name suggests, are metrics that might make you feel good about yourself – such as generating a bunch of likes on an update or having a large number of fans and followers – but if the metrics aren’t actually relevant to your specific social media marketing objectives (usually, the one’s management or clients ask for), then they are simply vanity metrics. They might look good on paper (or that PDF report you have to send regularly), but in the grand scheme of things, they don’t really matter much to the bottom line. 

Or, another way to look at vanity metrics is as metrics that don’t show a direct ROI, such as clicks, traffic and conversions made, which are “actionable metrics”. 

This isn’t to say that followers, likes, comments and so on aren’t important or relevant. In fact, depending on what your marketing objectives are, they might even be the most relevant stats you have. But in most cases, businesses care much more about results that they can actually understand from their point of view: a surge in traffic to their website, people signing up to their , social media fans buying their products or services or inquiring about them and so on. 

Because of this, the way you prove your social media ROI, depends on your objectives:

For objectives like brand awareness, engagement and so on, you can prove ROI simply by reaching objectives (for example, if your objective is to generate 200 new followers in 30 days, then you’ve proven ROI by reaching that goal). Alternatively, you can also assign these types of metrics a certain value. For example, a new follower might be worth $5, while a like could be worth $1.

For quantifiable objectives like conversions and sales made, you can be much more accurate about actual return on investment, as conversions and sales have a much clearer monetary value 

How to Establish Your Social Media Marketing Objectives

Whatever your directive is – and what results you’re supposed to achieve – you should always establish clear objectives beforehand and run them by your manager or client. The clearer you are about this from the start, the easier it will be to prove ROI and avoid any misunderstandings. 

The SMART goal-setting template works perfectly in this situation:

Be specific about what you want to achieve, down to the last detail

Make sure your goal is measurable and you know what KPIs you need to track so that you can actually prove your ROI 

Consider your goal carefully to make sure it’s actually attainable and you’re not shooting too high, which will mean you likely won’t be able to prove your ROI (consult your past analytics and results and use your gut instinct to ascertain whether a goal is truly attainable or not) 

Any social media objective should be relevant to that businesses’ marketing objectives – if the brand wants to raise awareness of their company, then your social media goals should reflect that

And finally, every goal should be time-bound – in other words — it needs a deadline! 

In short, SMART stands for:

Specific

Measurable

Attainable 

Relevant

And time-bound 

Establish your KPIs

As I mentioned before, one of the essential aspects of a good objective is that it needs to be measurable. 

Once you’ve set an objective and decided that it is in fact, measurable, you should also take the time to establish the exact KPIs you’ll need to monitor in order to prove the success of your objective. Below is a list of the most important and relevant social media KPIs: 

Engagement: likes, comments, shares and retweets and so on

Reach

Traffic back to website/landing page

Conversions made: people signing up for a list

Leads generated 

When your campaign starts, you should also start carefully tracking the relevant KPIs to monitor your performance and optimize it as you go along. Plus, it will help you measure your social media success.

Here are 3 useful social media tools to help you track these KPIs and prove your social media ROI: 1. Google Analytics & the Google Campaign URL Builder

Google Analytics can be one of your best friends when it comes to proving social media ROI. It can track what your social media traffic is doing on your website, as well as tell you how many conversions you’ve generated. 

To start leveraging Google Analytics to its full potential, make sure to create relevant conversion goals first. You can set up to 20 different conversion goals by going to Admin and clicking on Goals:

Set up different conversion goals in the Google Analytics admin.

As you can see above, you have multiple options for templates so that you can measure all kinds of conversions:

Making a reservation or an appointment

Buying or paying for something

Signing up for your email list

Checking out your contact page

Playing a certain media, and more 

Select the template you want to use (although you can also start from scratch) and follow the instructions to set up your conversion goals. As I mentioned earlier, you’re not allowed unlimited goals, so you might have to replace older ones that are no longer relevant whenever you have a new goal to track (like a new service you’re offering, or a different email list). 

Once you’ve created your goals, you’ll be able to track them for all of your traffic including, of course, your social media traffic. 

Then, when you head over to check your social media traffic in Google Analytics, you’ll also see a conversion rate for each of your social networks which will help you understand the quality of your traffic and help you focus on the social networks that drive results. 

Better yet, you’ll be able to see actual ROI from social media conversions. However, in order to have this information, you need give your conversion goals a monetary value when you set them up. For example, an email sign up might be worth $10, while buying something from you could be the average product or service price. 

Another way to leverage Google Analytics is to use UTM tracking links on your social media – you can create them using the Google Campaign URL Builder:

Create your tracking URLs with Google Campaign URL Builder.

Using UTM tracking links will allow you to really narrow down your findings, much more so than Google Analytics can on its own. For example, you can see which Facebook groups brought the most traffic or what kind of results a specific social media campaign brought in (traffic, conversions, etc.). 

Once you’ve set up these tracking links and started using them, you can track them in your Google Analytics account, under Acquisition – Campaigns. 

2. Agorapulse

Agorapulse has several useful features for tracking social media ROI and success, beyond the usual social media analytics: 

A social media ROI calculator for Facebook Pages

A built-in UTM link builder with dynamic features

First, let’s look at the ROI calculator. The tool uses 3 metrics to help determine an accurate ROI:

The number of engaged fans

The impressions you’ve generated

And the link clicks you got on your Page

The tool starts out with default values for each ($1/€1 for an engaged fan, $5/€5 for impressions and $1/€1 for clicks); it syncs its data on a daily basis and automatically generates your ROI value, broken down as seen in the screenshot below:

That said, you can always customize the monetary values for each in order to more accurately report your results: 

Discuss these values with clients/managers/etc. to come to a mutual agreement over the value of these metrics and you’ll then be able to automatically generate a Page’s ROI any time you need it. All that’s left to do is keep an eye on your results so you can change up your social media strategy when needed if you’re not getting enough positive results. 

Beyond that, you also have access to social media analytics for multiple major social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.), as well as the ability to export your reports. That said, the feature that I most want to talk about is the built-in UTM builder; this option will appear every time you upload a new update with a link:

Once you turn on UTM tracking, you can customize the parameters to your liking and even add extra parameters beyond the usual suspects (source, medium and campaign). And like before, you can track the results with your web analytics. 

This feature will allow you to easily add UTM tracking links (and shorten them automatically if you’ve also connected your Bit.ly account) to each and every link you share; even better, if you’re sharing a link to multiple networks and want to save quite a bit of time, you can select the “Dynamic” option under “Type” and Agorapulse will automatically select the correct social network, medium and profile and them to each UTM link.

To sum up, you can use these UTM tracking links in a variety of ways, when it comes to measuring your results (as they are also excellent tools for testing your social media):

To see where exactly your traffic is coming from (not just the social network as a whole but specific traffic sources, such as groups, updates and so on) 

To see exactly how many conversions you’ve generated and what your ROI is from these conversions (but, as I mentioned before, you also need to set up the right conversion goals in Google Analytics) 

Beyond that, you can get creative and use them in other ways too. For example, bra company Brayola often uses shortened UTM links whenever they direct people to their products, sales, offers, etc. within ad comments:

This way, they’re not just tracking results from the actual ad, but also from any comments happening. After all, it’s still an ROI from social media and by using the UTM links they can actually track to see if that comment helped them make a conversion or sale. 

3. Cyfe

As you might recall from earlier, it’s good practice to monitor your social media KPIs all the time, in order to optimize your campaigns on the go – with the goal of improving your results so that you can reach your objectives.

You can do so very easily with a business dashboard such as Cyfe. Basically, it’s a dashboard that you can connect to your social media analytics (Twitter Analytics, Facebook Insights, etc.) and use it to constantly monitor the KPIs you want. 

You can pull data from your social networks by using their pre-built widgets; click on “add widget” and then on Social Media to see what options you have:

As you can see, you can track pretty much any major social network (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, etc.), as well as your Bit.ly shares and clicks and Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook ads. 

Once you’ve taken the time to set it up, all you have to do is log into your dashboard to see how your results are evolving – use it not just to monitor these results, but also to help you put together your ROI and social media reports, using the data provided for the relevant social network.

Conclusion

With the right tools at your disposal and a strategy put in place to help you calculate your ROI, measuring your social media success doesn’t have to be the challenging feat that it might appear at the first sight. All you have to do is remember the steps you need to take in order to accurately measure your ROI:

Setting SMART objectives for your social media campaigns and strategies

Establishing what KPIs you’ll need to track in order to measure your objectives’ success

Clarifying what conversions you need to focus on and setting up the right conversion goals in Google Analytics

Leveraging useful tools to help you track your social media metrics and KPIs and calculate your ROI

What are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced when having to prove social media ROI? What is your strategy like and what types of tools do you use?   

The post Social Media ROI: How to Prove Your Efforts Are Paying Off appeared first on Convince and Convert: Social Media Consulting and Content Marketing Consulting.

http://bit.ly/2FibM6b

[byronheeutgm]

Social Media ROI: How to Prove Your Efforts Are Paying Off

One of the most difficult parts of social media marketing is actually proving its ROI. It’s easy to throw numbers around – likes, new followers, comments and so on – but how do you actually prove your return on investment from social media? 

How do you demonstrate that your work is bringing in revenue or helping the brand reach its marketing and business objectives? 

In this post, I’m going to share some of my best and most effective tips, tricks and tools to help prove your social media ROI. Let’s go.

Vanity Metrics vs. Actionable Metrics: What’s the Difference?

“Vanity metrics” is a term that’s thrown around a lot, but what does it actually mean in the context of social media marketing, and how is it relevant to measuring and proving your ROI?

What Are Vanity Metrics?

Vanity metrics, as the name suggests, are metrics that might make you feel good about yourself – such as generating a bunch of likes on an update or having a large number of fans and followers – but if the metrics aren’t actually relevant to your specific social media marketing objectives (usually, the one’s management or clients ask for), then they are simply vanity metrics. They might look good on paper (or that PDF report you have to send regularly), but in the grand scheme of things, they don’t really matter much to the bottom line. 

Or, another way to look at vanity metrics is as metrics that don’t show a direct ROI, such as clicks, traffic and conversions made, which are “actionable metrics”. 

This isn’t to say that followers, likes, comments and so on aren’t important or relevant. In fact, depending on what your marketing objectives are, they might even be the most relevant stats you have. But in most cases, businesses care much more about results that they can actually understand from their point of view: a surge in traffic to their website, people signing up to their , social media fans buying their products or services or inquiring about them and so on. 

Because of this, the way you prove your social media ROI, depends on your objectives:

For objectives like brand awareness, engagement and so on, you can prove ROI simply by reaching objectives (for example, if your objective is to generate 200 new followers in 30 days, then you’ve proven ROI by reaching that goal). Alternatively, you can also assign these types of metrics a certain value. For example, a new follower might be worth $5, while a like could be worth $1.

For quantifiable objectives like conversions and sales made, you can be much more accurate about actual return on investment, as conversions and sales have a much clearer monetary value 

How to Establish Your Social Media Marketing Objectives

Whatever your directive is – and what results you’re supposed to achieve – you should always establish clear objectives beforehand and run them by your manager or client. The clearer you are about this from the start, the easier it will be to prove ROI and avoid any misunderstandings. 

The SMART goal-setting template works perfectly in this situation:

Be specific about what you want to achieve, down to the last detail

Make sure your goal is measurable and you know what KPIs you need to track so that you can actually prove your ROI 

Consider your goal carefully to make sure it’s actually attainable and you’re not shooting too high, which will mean you likely won’t be able to prove your ROI (consult your past analytics and results and use your gut instinct to ascertain whether a goal is truly attainable or not) 

Any social media objective should be relevant to that businesses’ marketing objectives – if the brand wants to raise awareness of their company, then your social media goals should reflect that

And finally, every goal should be time-bound – in other words — it needs a deadline! 

In short, SMART stands for:

Specific

Measurable

Attainable 

Relevant

And time-bound 

Establish your KPIs

As I mentioned before, one of the essential aspects of a good objective is that it needs to be measurable. 

Once you’ve set an objective and decided that it is in fact, measurable, you should also take the time to establish the exact KPIs you’ll need to monitor in order to prove the success of your objective. Below is a list of the most important and relevant social media KPIs: 

Engagement: likes, comments, shares and retweets and so on

Reach

Traffic back to website/landing page

Conversions made: people signing up for a list

Leads generated 

When your campaign starts, you should also start carefully tracking the relevant KPIs to monitor your performance and optimize it as you go along. Plus, it will help you measure your social media success.

Here are 3 useful social media tools to help you track these KPIs and prove your social media ROI: 1. Google Analytics & the Google Campaign URL Builder

Google Analytics can be one of your best friends when it comes to proving social media ROI. It can track what your social media traffic is doing on your website, as well as tell you how many conversions you’ve generated. 

To start leveraging Google Analytics to its full potential, make sure to create relevant conversion goals first. You can set up to 20 different conversion goals by going to Admin and clicking on Goals:

Set up different conversion goals in the Google Analytics admin.

As you can see above, you have multiple options for templates so that you can measure all kinds of conversions:

Making a reservation or an appointment

Buying or paying for something

Signing up for your email list

Checking out your contact page

Playing a certain media, and more 

Select the template you want to use (although you can also start from scratch) and follow the instructions to set up your conversion goals. As I mentioned earlier, you’re not allowed unlimited goals, so you might have to replace older ones that are no longer relevant whenever you have a new goal to track (like a new service you’re offering, or a different email list). 

Once you’ve created your goals, you’ll be able to track them for all of your traffic including, of course, your social media traffic. 

Then, when you head over to check your social media traffic in Google Analytics, you’ll also see a conversion rate for each of your social networks which will help you understand the quality of your traffic and help you focus on the social networks that drive results. 

Better yet, you’ll be able to see actual ROI from social media conversions. However, in order to have this information, you need give your conversion goals a monetary value when you set them up. For example, an email sign up might be worth $10, while buying something from you could be the average product or service price. 

Another way to leverage Google Analytics is to use UTM tracking links on your social media – you can create them using the Google Campaign URL Builder:

Create your tracking URLs with Google Campaign URL Builder.

Using UTM tracking links will allow you to really narrow down your findings, much more so than Google Analytics can on its own. For example, you can see which Facebook groups brought the most traffic or what kind of results a specific social media campaign brought in (traffic, conversions, etc.). 

Once you’ve set up these tracking links and started using them, you can track them in your Google Analytics account, under Acquisition – Campaigns. 

2. Agorapulse

Agorapulse has several useful features for tracking social media ROI and success, beyond the usual social media analytics: 

A social media ROI calculator for Facebook Pages

A built-in UTM link builder with dynamic features

First, let’s look at the ROI calculator. The tool uses 3 metrics to help determine an accurate ROI:

The number of engaged fans

The impressions you’ve generated

And the link clicks you got on your Page

The tool starts out with default values for each ($1/€1 for an engaged fan, $5/€5 for impressions and $1/€1 for clicks); it syncs its data on a daily basis and automatically generates your ROI value, broken down as seen in the screenshot below:

That said, you can always customize the monetary values for each in order to more accurately report your results: 

Discuss these values with clients/managers/etc. to come to a mutual agreement over the value of these metrics and you’ll then be able to automatically generate a Page’s ROI any time you need it. All that’s left to do is keep an eye on your results so you can change up your social media strategy when needed if you’re not getting enough positive results. 

Beyond that, you also have access to social media analytics for multiple major social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.), as well as the ability to export your reports. That said, the feature that I most want to talk about is the built-in UTM builder; this option will appear every time you upload a new update with a link:

Once you turn on UTM tracking, you can customize the parameters to your liking and even add extra parameters beyond the usual suspects (source, medium and campaign). And like before, you can track the results with your web analytics. 

This feature will allow you to easily add UTM tracking links (and shorten them automatically if you’ve also connected your Bit.ly account) to each and every link you share; even better, if you’re sharing a link to multiple networks and want to save quite a bit of time, you can select the “Dynamic” option under “Type” and Agorapulse will automatically select the correct social network, medium and profile and them to each UTM link.

To sum up, you can use these UTM tracking links in a variety of ways, when it comes to measuring your results (as they are also excellent tools for testing your social media):

To see where exactly your traffic is coming from (not just the social network as a whole but specific traffic sources, such as groups, updates and so on) 

To see exactly how many conversions you’ve generated and what your ROI is from these conversions (but, as I mentioned before, you also need to set up the right conversion goals in Google Analytics) 

Beyond that, you can get creative and use them in other ways too. For example, bra company Brayola often uses shortened UTM links whenever they direct people to their products, sales, offers, etc. within ad comments:

This way, they’re not just tracking results from the actual ad, but also from any comments happening. After all, it’s still an ROI from social media and by using the UTM links they can actually track to see if that comment helped them make a conversion or sale. 

3. Cyfe

As you might recall from earlier, it’s good practice to monitor your social media KPIs all the time, in order to optimize your campaigns on the go – with the goal of improving your results so that you can reach your objectives.

You can do so very easily with a business dashboard such as Cyfe. Basically, it’s a dashboard that you can connect to your social media analytics (Twitter Analytics, Facebook Insights, etc.) and use it to constantly monitor the KPIs you want. 

You can pull data from your social networks by using their pre-built widgets; click on “add widget” and then on Social Media to see what options you have:

As you can see, you can track pretty much any major social network (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, etc.), as well as your Bit.ly shares and clicks and Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook ads. 

Once you’ve taken the time to set it up, all you have to do is log into your dashboard to see how your results are evolving – use it not just to monitor these results, but also to help you put together your ROI and social media reports, using the data provided for the relevant social network.

Conclusion

With the right tools at your disposal and a strategy put in place to help you calculate your ROI, measuring your social media success doesn’t have to be the challenging feat that it might appear at the first sight. All you have to do is remember the steps you need to take in order to accurately measure your ROI:

Setting SMART objectives for your social media campaigns and strategies

Establishing what KPIs you’ll need to track in order to measure your objectives’ success

Clarifying what conversions you need to focus on and setting up the right conversion goals in Google Analytics

Leveraging useful tools to help you track your social media metrics and KPIs and calculate your ROI

What are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced when having to prove social media ROI? What is your strategy like and what types of tools do you use?   

The post Social Media ROI: How to Prove Your Efforts Are Paying Off appeared first on Convince and Convert: Social Media Consulting and Content Marketing Consulting.

http://bit.ly/2FibM6b

[mariasolemarionqi]

Social Media ROI: How to Prove Your Efforts Are Paying Off

One of the most difficult parts of social media marketing is actually proving its ROI. It’s easy to throw numbers around – likes, new followers, comments and so on – but how do you actually prove your return on investment from social media? 

How do you demonstrate that your work is bringing in revenue or helping the brand reach its marketing and business objectives? 

In this post, I’m going to share some of my best and most effective tips, tricks and tools to help prove your social media ROI. Let’s go.

Vanity Metrics vs. Actionable Metrics: What’s the Difference?

“Vanity metrics” is a term that’s thrown around a lot, but what does it actually mean in the context of social media marketing, and how is it relevant to measuring and proving your ROI?

What Are Vanity Metrics?

Vanity metrics, as the name suggests, are metrics that might make you feel good about yourself – such as generating a bunch of likes on an update or having a large number of fans and followers – but if the metrics aren’t actually relevant to your specific social media marketing objectives (usually, the one’s management or clients ask for), then they are simply vanity metrics. They might look good on paper (or that PDF report you have to send regularly), but in the grand scheme of things, they don’t really matter much to the bottom line. 

Or, another way to look at vanity metrics is as metrics that don’t show a direct ROI, such as clicks, traffic and conversions made, which are “actionable metrics”. 

This isn’t to say that followers, likes, comments and so on aren’t important or relevant. In fact, depending on what your marketing objectives are, they might even be the most relevant stats you have. But in most cases, businesses care much more about results that they can actually understand from their point of view: a surge in traffic to their website, people signing up to their , social media fans buying their products or services or inquiring about them and so on. 

Because of this, the way you prove your social media ROI, depends on your objectives:

For objectives like brand awareness, engagement and so on, you can prove ROI simply by reaching objectives (for example, if your objective is to generate 200 new followers in 30 days, then you’ve proven ROI by reaching that goal). Alternatively, you can also assign these types of metrics a certain value. For example, a new follower might be worth $5, while a like could be worth $1.

For quantifiable objectives like conversions and sales made, you can be much more accurate about actual return on investment, as conversions and sales have a much clearer monetary value 

How to Establish Your Social Media Marketing Objectives

Whatever your directive is – and what results you’re supposed to achieve – you should always establish clear objectives beforehand and run them by your manager or client. The clearer you are about this from the start, the easier it will be to prove ROI and avoid any misunderstandings. 

The SMART goal-setting template works perfectly in this situation:

Be specific about what you want to achieve, down to the last detail

Make sure your goal is measurable and you know what KPIs you need to track so that you can actually prove your ROI 

Consider your goal carefully to make sure it’s actually attainable and you’re not shooting too high, which will mean you likely won’t be able to prove your ROI (consult your past analytics and results and use your gut instinct to ascertain whether a goal is truly attainable or not) 

Any social media objective should be relevant to that businesses’ marketing objectives – if the brand wants to raise awareness of their company, then your social media goals should reflect that

And finally, every goal should be time-bound – in other words — it needs a deadline! 

In short, SMART stands for:

Specific

Measurable

Attainable 

Relevant

And time-bound 

Establish your KPIs

As I mentioned before, one of the essential aspects of a good objective is that it needs to be measurable. 

Once you’ve set an objective and decided that it is in fact, measurable, you should also take the time to establish the exact KPIs you’ll need to monitor in order to prove the success of your objective. Below is a list of the most important and relevant social media KPIs: 

Engagement: likes, comments, shares and retweets and so on

Reach

Traffic back to website/landing page

Conversions made: people signing up for a list

Leads generated 

When your campaign starts, you should also start carefully tracking the relevant KPIs to monitor your performance and optimize it as you go along. Plus, it will help you measure your social media success.

Here are 3 useful social media tools to help you track these KPIs and prove your social media ROI: 1. Google Analytics & the Google Campaign URL Builder

Google Analytics can be one of your best friends when it comes to proving social media ROI. It can track what your social media traffic is doing on your website, as well as tell you how many conversions you’ve generated. 

To start leveraging Google Analytics to its full potential, make sure to create relevant conversion goals first. You can set up to 20 different conversion goals by going to Admin and clicking on Goals:

Set up different conversion goals in the Google Analytics admin.

As you can see above, you have multiple options for templates so that you can measure all kinds of conversions:

Making a reservation or an appointment

Buying or paying for something

Signing up for your email list

Checking out your contact page

Playing a certain media, and more 

Select the template you want to use (although you can also start from scratch) and follow the instructions to set up your conversion goals. As I mentioned earlier, you’re not allowed unlimited goals, so you might have to replace older ones that are no longer relevant whenever you have a new goal to track (like a new service you’re offering, or a different email list). 

Once you’ve created your goals, you’ll be able to track them for all of your traffic including, of course, your social media traffic. 

Then, when you head over to check your social media traffic in Google Analytics, you’ll also see a conversion rate for each of your social networks which will help you understand the quality of your traffic and help you focus on the social networks that drive results. 

Better yet, you’ll be able to see actual ROI from social media conversions. However, in order to have this information, you need give your conversion goals a monetary value when you set them up. For example, an email sign up might be worth $10, while buying something from you could be the average product or service price. 

Another way to leverage Google Analytics is to use UTM tracking links on your social media – you can create them using the Google Campaign URL Builder:

Create your tracking URLs with Google Campaign URL Builder.

Using UTM tracking links will allow you to really narrow down your findings, much more so than Google Analytics can on its own. For example, you can see which Facebook groups brought the most traffic or what kind of results a specific social media campaign brought in (traffic, conversions, etc.). 

Once you’ve set up these tracking links and started using them, you can track them in your Google Analytics account, under Acquisition – Campaigns. 

2. Agorapulse

Agorapulse has several useful features for tracking social media ROI and success, beyond the usual social media analytics: 

A social media ROI calculator for Facebook Pages

A built-in UTM link builder with dynamic features

First, let’s look at the ROI calculator. The tool uses 3 metrics to help determine an accurate ROI:

The number of engaged fans

The impressions you’ve generated

And the link clicks you got on your Page

The tool starts out with default values for each ($1/€1 for an engaged fan, $5/€5 for impressions and $1/€1 for clicks); it syncs its data on a daily basis and automatically generates your ROI value, broken down as seen in the screenshot below:

That said, you can always customize the monetary values for each in order to more accurately report your results: 

Discuss these values with clients/managers/etc. to come to a mutual agreement over the value of these metrics and you’ll then be able to automatically generate a Page’s ROI any time you need it. All that’s left to do is keep an eye on your results so you can change up your social media strategy when needed if you’re not getting enough positive results. 

Beyond that, you also have access to social media analytics for multiple major social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.), as well as the ability to export your reports. That said, the feature that I most want to talk about is the built-in UTM builder; this option will appear every time you upload a new update with a link:

Once you turn on UTM tracking, you can customize the parameters to your liking and even add extra parameters beyond the usual suspects (source, medium and campaign). And like before, you can track the results with your web analytics. 

This feature will allow you to easily add UTM tracking links (and shorten them automatically if you’ve also connected your Bit.ly account) to each and every link you share; even better, if you’re sharing a link to multiple networks and want to save quite a bit of time, you can select the “Dynamic” option under “Type” and Agorapulse will automatically select the correct social network, medium and profile and them to each UTM link.

To sum up, you can use these UTM tracking links in a variety of ways, when it comes to measuring your results (as they are also excellent tools for testing your social media):

To see where exactly your traffic is coming from (not just the social network as a whole but specific traffic sources, such as groups, updates and so on) 

To see exactly how many conversions you’ve generated and what your ROI is from these conversions (but, as I mentioned before, you also need to set up the right conversion goals in Google Analytics) 

Beyond that, you can get creative and use them in other ways too. For example, bra company Brayola often uses shortened UTM links whenever they direct people to their products, sales, offers, etc. within ad comments:

This way, they’re not just tracking results from the actual ad, but also from any comments happening. After all, it’s still an ROI from social media and by using the UTM links they can actually track to see if that comment helped them make a conversion or sale. 

3. Cyfe

As you might recall from earlier, it’s good practice to monitor your social media KPIs all the time, in order to optimize your campaigns on the go – with the goal of improving your results so that you can reach your objectives.

You can do so very easily with a business dashboard such as Cyfe. Basically, it’s a dashboard that you can connect to your social media analytics (Twitter Analytics, Facebook Insights, etc.) and use it to constantly monitor the KPIs you want. 

You can pull data from your social networks by using their pre-built widgets; click on “add widget” and then on Social Media to see what options you have:

As you can see, you can track pretty much any major social network (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, etc.), as well as your Bit.ly shares and clicks and Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook ads. 

Once you’ve taken the time to set it up, all you have to do is log into your dashboard to see how your results are evolving – use it not just to monitor these results, but also to help you put together your ROI and social media reports, using the data provided for the relevant social network.

Conclusion

With the right tools at your disposal and a strategy put in place to help you calculate your ROI, measuring your social media success doesn’t have to be the challenging feat that it might appear at the first sight. All you have to do is remember the steps you need to take in order to accurately measure your ROI:

Setting SMART objectives for your social media campaigns and strategies

Establishing what KPIs you’ll need to track in order to measure your objectives’ success

Clarifying what conversions you need to focus on and setting up the right conversion goals in Google Analytics

Leveraging useful tools to help you track your social media metrics and KPIs and calculate your ROI

What are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced when having to prove social media ROI? What is your strategy like and what types of tools do you use?   

The post Social Media ROI: How to Prove Your Efforts Are Paying Off appeared first on Convince and Convert: Social Media Consulting and Content Marketing Consulting.

http://bit.ly/2FibM6b

[fairchildlingpo1]

Social Media ROI: How to Prove Your Efforts Are Paying Off

One of the most difficult parts of social media marketing is actually proving its ROI. It’s easy to throw numbers around – likes, new followers, comments and so on – but how do you actually prove your return on investment from social media? 

How do you demonstrate that your work is bringing in revenue or helping the brand reach its marketing and business objectives? 

In this post, I’m going to share some of my best and most effective tips, tricks and tools to help prove your social media ROI. Let’s go.

Vanity Metrics vs. Actionable Metrics: What’s the Difference?

“Vanity metrics” is a term that’s thrown around a lot, but what does it actually mean in the context of social media marketing, and how is it relevant to measuring and proving your ROI?

What Are Vanity Metrics?

Vanity metrics, as the name suggests, are metrics that might make you feel good about yourself – such as generating a bunch of likes on an update or having a large number of fans and followers – but if the metrics aren’t actually relevant to your specific social media marketing objectives (usually, the one’s management or clients ask for), then they are simply vanity metrics. They might look good on paper (or that PDF report you have to send regularly), but in the grand scheme of things, they don’t really matter much to the bottom line. 

Or, another way to look at vanity metrics is as metrics that don’t show a direct ROI, such as clicks, traffic and conversions made, which are “actionable metrics”. 

This isn’t to say that followers, likes, comments and so on aren’t important or relevant. In fact, depending on what your marketing objectives are, they might even be the most relevant stats you have. But in most cases, businesses care much more about results that they can actually understand from their point of view: a surge in traffic to their website, people signing up to their , social media fans buying their products or services or inquiring about them and so on. 

Because of this, the way you prove your social media ROI, depends on your objectives:

For objectives like brand awareness, engagement and so on, you can prove ROI simply by reaching objectives (for example, if your objective is to generate 200 new followers in 30 days, then you’ve proven ROI by reaching that goal). Alternatively, you can also assign these types of metrics a certain value. For example, a new follower might be worth $5, while a like could be worth $1.

For quantifiable objectives like conversions and sales made, you can be much more accurate about actual return on investment, as conversions and sales have a much clearer monetary value 

How to Establish Your Social Media Marketing Objectives

Whatever your directive is – and what results you’re supposed to achieve – you should always establish clear objectives beforehand and run them by your manager or client. The clearer you are about this from the start, the easier it will be to prove ROI and avoid any misunderstandings. 

The SMART goal-setting template works perfectly in this situation:

Be specific about what you want to achieve, down to the last detail

Make sure your goal is measurable and you know what KPIs you need to track so that you can actually prove your ROI 

Consider your goal carefully to make sure it’s actually attainable and you’re not shooting too high, which will mean you likely won’t be able to prove your ROI (consult your past analytics and results and use your gut instinct to ascertain whether a goal is truly attainable or not) 

Any social media objective should be relevant to that businesses’ marketing objectives – if the brand wants to raise awareness of their company, then your social media goals should reflect that

And finally, every goal should be time-bound – in other words — it needs a deadline! 

In short, SMART stands for:

Specific

Measurable

Attainable 

Relevant

And time-bound 

Establish your KPIs

As I mentioned before, one of the essential aspects of a good objective is that it needs to be measurable. 

Once you’ve set an objective and decided that it is in fact, measurable, you should also take the time to establish the exact KPIs you’ll need to monitor in order to prove the success of your objective. Below is a list of the most important and relevant social media KPIs: 

Engagement: likes, comments, shares and retweets and so on

Reach

Traffic back to website/landing page

Conversions made: people signing up for a list

Leads generated 

When your campaign starts, you should also start carefully tracking the relevant KPIs to monitor your performance and optimize it as you go along. Plus, it will help you measure your social media success.

Here are 3 useful social media tools to help you track these KPIs and prove your social media ROI: 1. Google Analytics & the Google Campaign URL Builder

Google Analytics can be one of your best friends when it comes to proving social media ROI. It can track what your social media traffic is doing on your website, as well as tell you how many conversions you’ve generated. 

To start leveraging Google Analytics to its full potential, make sure to create relevant conversion goals first. You can set up to 20 different conversion goals by going to Admin and clicking on Goals:

Set up different conversion goals in the Google Analytics admin.

As you can see above, you have multiple options for templates so that you can measure all kinds of conversions:

Making a reservation or an appointment

Buying or paying for something

Signing up for your email list

Checking out your contact page

Playing a certain media, and more 

Select the template you want to use (although you can also start from scratch) and follow the instructions to set up your conversion goals. As I mentioned earlier, you’re not allowed unlimited goals, so you might have to replace older ones that are no longer relevant whenever you have a new goal to track (like a new service you’re offering, or a different email list). 

Once you’ve created your goals, you’ll be able to track them for all of your traffic including, of course, your social media traffic. 

Then, when you head over to check your social media traffic in Google Analytics, you’ll also see a conversion rate for each of your social networks which will help you understand the quality of your traffic and help you focus on the social networks that drive results. 

Better yet, you’ll be able to see actual ROI from social media conversions. However, in order to have this information, you need give your conversion goals a monetary value when you set them up. For example, an email sign up might be worth $10, while buying something from you could be the average product or service price. 

Another way to leverage Google Analytics is to use UTM tracking links on your social media – you can create them using the Google Campaign URL Builder:

Create your tracking URLs with Google Campaign URL Builder.

Using UTM tracking links will allow you to really narrow down your findings, much more so than Google Analytics can on its own. For example, you can see which Facebook groups brought the most traffic or what kind of results a specific social media campaign brought in (traffic, conversions, etc.). 

Once you’ve set up these tracking links and started using them, you can track them in your Google Analytics account, under Acquisition – Campaigns. 

2. Agorapulse

Agorapulse has several useful features for tracking social media ROI and success, beyond the usual social media analytics: 

A social media ROI calculator for Facebook Pages

A built-in UTM link builder with dynamic features

First, let’s look at the ROI calculator. The tool uses 3 metrics to help determine an accurate ROI:

The number of engaged fans

The impressions you’ve generated

And the link clicks you got on your Page

The tool starts out with default values for each ($1/€1 for an engaged fan, $5/€5 for impressions and $1/€1 for clicks); it syncs its data on a daily basis and automatically generates your ROI value, broken down as seen in the screenshot below:

That said, you can always customize the monetary values for each in order to more accurately report your results: 

Discuss these values with clients/managers/etc. to come to a mutual agreement over the value of these metrics and you’ll then be able to automatically generate a Page’s ROI any time you need it. All that’s left to do is keep an eye on your results so you can change up your social media strategy when needed if you’re not getting enough positive results. 

Beyond that, you also have access to social media analytics for multiple major social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.), as well as the ability to export your reports. That said, the feature that I most want to talk about is the built-in UTM builder; this option will appear every time you upload a new update with a link:

Once you turn on UTM tracking, you can customize the parameters to your liking and even add extra parameters beyond the usual suspects (source, medium and campaign). And like before, you can track the results with your web analytics. 

This feature will allow you to easily add UTM tracking links (and shorten them automatically if you’ve also connected your Bit.ly account) to each and every link you share; even better, if you’re sharing a link to multiple networks and want to save quite a bit of time, you can select the “Dynamic” option under “Type” and Agorapulse will automatically select the correct social network, medium and profile and them to each UTM link.

To sum up, you can use these UTM tracking links in a variety of ways, when it comes to measuring your results (as they are also excellent tools for testing your social media):

To see where exactly your traffic is coming from (not just the social network as a whole but specific traffic sources, such as groups, updates and so on) 

To see exactly how many conversions you’ve generated and what your ROI is from these conversions (but, as I mentioned before, you also need to set up the right conversion goals in Google Analytics) 

Beyond that, you can get creative and use them in other ways too. For example, bra company Brayola often uses shortened UTM links whenever they direct people to their products, sales, offers, etc. within ad comments:

This way, they’re not just tracking results from the actual ad, but also from any comments happening. After all, it’s still an ROI from social media and by using the UTM links they can actually track to see if that comment helped them make a conversion or sale. 

3. Cyfe

As you might recall from earlier, it’s good practice to monitor your social media KPIs all the time, in order to optimize your campaigns on the go – with the goal of improving your results so that you can reach your objectives.

You can do so very easily with a business dashboard such as Cyfe. Basically, it’s a dashboard that you can connect to your social media analytics (Twitter Analytics, Facebook Insights, etc.) and use it to constantly monitor the KPIs you want. 

You can pull data from your social networks by using their pre-built widgets; click on “add widget” and then on Social Media to see what options you have:

As you can see, you can track pretty much any major social network (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, etc.), as well as your Bit.ly shares and clicks and Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook ads. 

Once you’ve taken the time to set it up, all you have to do is log into your dashboard to see how your results are evolving – use it not just to monitor these results, but also to help you put together your ROI and social media reports, using the data provided for the relevant social network.

Conclusion

With the right tools at your disposal and a strategy put in place to help you calculate your ROI, measuring your social media success doesn’t have to be the challenging feat that it might appear at the first sight. All you have to do is remember the steps you need to take in order to accurately measure your ROI:

Setting SMART objectives for your social media campaigns and strategies

Establishing what KPIs you’ll need to track in order to measure your objectives’ success

Clarifying what conversions you need to focus on and setting up the right conversion goals in Google Analytics

Leveraging useful tools to help you track your social media metrics and KPIs and calculate your ROI

What are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced when having to prove social media ROI? What is your strategy like and what types of tools do you use?   

The post Social Media ROI: How to Prove Your Efforts Are Paying Off appeared first on Convince and Convert: Social Media Consulting and Content Marketing Consulting.

http://bit.ly/2FibM6b

[christinesumpmg1]

Social Media ROI: How to Prove Your Efforts Are Paying Off

One of the most difficult parts of social media marketing is actually proving its ROI. It’s easy to throw numbers around – likes, new followers, comments and so on – but how do you actually prove your return on investment from social media? 

How do you demonstrate that your work is bringing in revenue or helping the brand reach its marketing and business objectives? 

In this post, I’m going to share some of my best and most effective tips, tricks and tools to help prove your social media ROI. Let’s go.

Vanity Metrics vs. Actionable Metrics: What’s the Difference?

“Vanity metrics” is a term that’s thrown around a lot, but what does it actually mean in the context of social media marketing, and how is it relevant to measuring and proving your ROI?

What Are Vanity Metrics?

Vanity metrics, as the name suggests, are metrics that might make you feel good about yourself – such as generating a bunch of likes on an update or having a large number of fans and followers – but if the metrics aren’t actually relevant to your specific social media marketing objectives (usually, the one’s management or clients ask for), then they are simply vanity metrics. They might look good on paper (or that PDF report you have to send regularly), but in the grand scheme of things, they don’t really matter much to the bottom line. 

Or, another way to look at vanity metrics is as metrics that don’t show a direct ROI, such as clicks, traffic and conversions made, which are “actionable metrics”. 

This isn’t to say that followers, likes, comments and so on aren’t important or relevant. In fact, depending on what your marketing objectives are, they might even be the most relevant stats you have. But in most cases, businesses care much more about results that they can actually understand from their point of view: a surge in traffic to their website, people signing up to their , social media fans buying their products or services or inquiring about them and so on. 

Because of this, the way you prove your social media ROI, depends on your objectives:

For objectives like brand awareness, engagement and so on, you can prove ROI simply by reaching objectives (for example, if your objective is to generate 200 new followers in 30 days, then you’ve proven ROI by reaching that goal). Alternatively, you can also assign these types of metrics a certain value. For example, a new follower might be worth $5, while a like could be worth $1.

For quantifiable objectives like conversions and sales made, you can be much more accurate about actual return on investment, as conversions and sales have a much clearer monetary value 

How to Establish Your Social Media Marketing Objectives

Whatever your directive is – and what results you’re supposed to achieve – you should always establish clear objectives beforehand and run them by your manager or client. The clearer you are about this from the start, the easier it will be to prove ROI and avoid any misunderstandings. 

The SMART goal-setting template works perfectly in this situation:

Be specific about what you want to achieve, down to the last detail

Make sure your goal is measurable and you know what KPIs you need to track so that you can actually prove your ROI 

Consider your goal carefully to make sure it’s actually attainable and you’re not shooting too high, which will mean you likely won’t be able to prove your ROI (consult your past analytics and results and use your gut instinct to ascertain whether a goal is truly attainable or not) 

Any social media objective should be relevant to that businesses’ marketing objectives – if the brand wants to raise awareness of their company, then your social media goals should reflect that

And finally, every goal should be time-bound – in other words — it needs a deadline! 

In short, SMART stands for:

Specific

Measurable

Attainable 

Relevant

And time-bound 

Establish your KPIs

As I mentioned before, one of the essential aspects of a good objective is that it needs to be measurable. 

Once you’ve set an objective and decided that it is in fact, measurable, you should also take the time to establish the exact KPIs you’ll need to monitor in order to prove the success of your objective. Below is a list of the most important and relevant social media KPIs: 

Engagement: likes, comments, shares and retweets and so on

Reach

Traffic back to website/landing page

Conversions made: people signing up for a list

Leads generated 

When your campaign starts, you should also start carefully tracking the relevant KPIs to monitor your performance and optimize it as you go along. Plus, it will help you measure your social media success.

Here are 3 useful social media tools to help you track these KPIs and prove your social media ROI: 1. Google Analytics & the Google Campaign URL Builder

Google Analytics can be one of your best friends when it comes to proving social media ROI. It can track what your social media traffic is doing on your website, as well as tell you how many conversions you’ve generated. 

To start leveraging Google Analytics to its full potential, make sure to create relevant conversion goals first. You can set up to 20 different conversion goals by going to Admin and clicking on Goals:

Set up different conversion goals in the Google Analytics admin.

As you can see above, you have multiple options for templates so that you can measure all kinds of conversions:

Making a reservation or an appointment

Buying or paying for something

Signing up for your email list

Checking out your contact page

Playing a certain media, and more 

Select the template you want to use (although you can also start from scratch) and follow the instructions to set up your conversion goals. As I mentioned earlier, you’re not allowed unlimited goals, so you might have to replace older ones that are no longer relevant whenever you have a new goal to track (like a new service you’re offering, or a different email list). 

Once you’ve created your goals, you’ll be able to track them for all of your traffic including, of course, your social media traffic. 

Then, when you head over to check your social media traffic in Google Analytics, you’ll also see a conversion rate for each of your social networks which will help you understand the quality of your traffic and help you focus on the social networks that drive results. 

Better yet, you’ll be able to see actual ROI from social media conversions. However, in order to have this information, you need give your conversion goals a monetary value when you set them up. For example, an email sign up might be worth $10, while buying something from you could be the average product or service price. 

Another way to leverage Google Analytics is to use UTM tracking links on your social media – you can create them using the Google Campaign URL Builder:

Create your tracking URLs with Google Campaign URL Builder.

Using UTM tracking links will allow you to really narrow down your findings, much more so than Google Analytics can on its own. For example, you can see which Facebook groups brought the most traffic or what kind of results a specific social media campaign brought in (traffic, conversions, etc.). 

Once you’ve set up these tracking links and started using them, you can track them in your Google Analytics account, under Acquisition – Campaigns. 

2. Agorapulse

Agorapulse has several useful features for tracking social media ROI and success, beyond the usual social media analytics: 

A social media ROI calculator for Facebook Pages

A built-in UTM link builder with dynamic features

First, let’s look at the ROI calculator. The tool uses 3 metrics to help determine an accurate ROI:

The number of engaged fans

The impressions you’ve generated

And the link clicks you got on your Page

The tool starts out with default values for each ($1/€1 for an engaged fan, $5/€5 for impressions and $1/€1 for clicks); it syncs its data on a daily basis and automatically generates your ROI value, broken down as seen in the screenshot below:

That said, you can always customize the monetary values for each in order to more accurately report your results: 

Discuss these values with clients/managers/etc. to come to a mutual agreement over the value of these metrics and you’ll then be able to automatically generate a Page’s ROI any time you need it. All that’s left to do is keep an eye on your results so you can change up your social media strategy when needed if you’re not getting enough positive results. 

Beyond that, you also have access to social media analytics for multiple major social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.), as well as the ability to export your reports. That said, the feature that I most want to talk about is the built-in UTM builder; this option will appear every time you upload a new update with a link:

Once you turn on UTM tracking, you can customize the parameters to your liking and even add extra parameters beyond the usual suspects (source, medium and campaign). And like before, you can track the results with your web analytics. 

This feature will allow you to easily add UTM tracking links (and shorten them automatically if you’ve also connected your Bit.ly account) to each and every link you share; even better, if you’re sharing a link to multiple networks and want to save quite a bit of time, you can select the “Dynamic” option under “Type” and Agorapulse will automatically select the correct social network, medium and profile and them to each UTM link.

To sum up, you can use these UTM tracking links in a variety of ways, when it comes to measuring your results (as they are also excellent tools for testing your social media):

To see where exactly your traffic is coming from (not just the social network as a whole but specific traffic sources, such as groups, updates and so on) 

To see exactly how many conversions you’ve generated and what your ROI is from these conversions (but, as I mentioned before, you also need to set up the right conversion goals in Google Analytics) 

Beyond that, you can get creative and use them in other ways too. For example, bra company Brayola often uses shortened UTM links whenever they direct people to their products, sales, offers, etc. within ad comments:

This way, they’re not just tracking results from the actual ad, but also from any comments happening. After all, it’s still an ROI from social media and by using the UTM links they can actually track to see if that comment helped them make a conversion or sale. 

3. Cyfe

As you might recall from earlier, it’s good practice to monitor your social media KPIs all the time, in order to optimize your campaigns on the go – with the goal of improving your results so that you can reach your objectives.

You can do so very easily with a business dashboard such as Cyfe. Basically, it’s a dashboard that you can connect to your social media analytics (Twitter Analytics, Facebook Insights, etc.) and use it to constantly monitor the KPIs you want. 

You can pull data from your social networks by using their pre-built widgets; click on “add widget” and then on Social Media to see what options you have:

As you can see, you can track pretty much any major social network (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, etc.), as well as your Bit.ly shares and clicks and Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook ads. 

Once you’ve taken the time to set it up, all you have to do is log into your dashboard to see how your results are evolving – use it not just to monitor these results, but also to help you put together your ROI and social media reports, using the data provided for the relevant social network.

Conclusion

With the right tools at your disposal and a strategy put in place to help you calculate your ROI, measuring your social media success doesn’t have to be the challenging feat that it might appear at the first sight. All you have to do is remember the steps you need to take in order to accurately measure your ROI:

Setting SMART objectives for your social media campaigns and strategies

Establishing what KPIs you’ll need to track in order to measure your objectives’ success

Clarifying what conversions you need to focus on and setting up the right conversion goals in Google Analytics

Leveraging useful tools to help you track your social media metrics and KPIs and calculate your ROI

What are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced when having to prove social media ROI? What is your strategy like and what types of tools do you use?   

The post Social Media ROI: How to Prove Your Efforts Are Paying Off appeared first on Convince and Convert: Social Media Consulting and Content Marketing Consulting.

http://bit.ly/2FibM6b

[conniecogeie]

Social Media ROI: How to Prove Your Efforts Are Paying Off

One of the most difficult parts of social media marketing is actually proving its ROI. It’s easy to throw numbers around – likes, new followers, comments and so on – but how do you actually prove your return on investment from social media? 

How do you demonstrate that your work is bringing in revenue or helping the brand reach its marketing and business objectives? 

In this post, I’m going to share some of my best and most effective tips, tricks and tools to help prove your social media ROI. Let’s go.

Vanity Metrics vs. Actionable Metrics: What’s the Difference?

“Vanity metrics” is a term that’s thrown around a lot, but what does it actually mean in the context of social media marketing, and how is it relevant to measuring and proving your ROI?

What Are Vanity Metrics?

Vanity metrics, as the name suggests, are metrics that might make you feel good about yourself – such as generating a bunch of likes on an update or having a large number of fans and followers – but if the metrics aren’t actually relevant to your specific social media marketing objectives (usually, the one’s management or clients ask for), then they are simply vanity metrics. They might look good on paper (or that PDF report you have to send regularly), but in the grand scheme of things, they don’t really matter much to the bottom line. 

Or, another way to look at vanity metrics is as metrics that don’t show a direct ROI, such as clicks, traffic and conversions made, which are “actionable metrics”. 

This isn’t to say that followers, likes, comments and so on aren’t important or relevant. In fact, depending on what your marketing objectives are, they might even be the most relevant stats you have. But in most cases, businesses care much more about results that they can actually understand from their point of view: a surge in traffic to their website, people signing up to their , social media fans buying their products or services or inquiring about them and so on. 

Because of this, the way you prove your social media ROI, depends on your objectives:

For objectives like brand awareness, engagement and so on, you can prove ROI simply by reaching objectives (for example, if your objective is to generate 200 new followers in 30 days, then you’ve proven ROI by reaching that goal). Alternatively, you can also assign these types of metrics a certain value. For example, a new follower might be worth $5, while a like could be worth $1.

For quantifiable objectives like conversions and sales made, you can be much more accurate about actual return on investment, as conversions and sales have a much clearer monetary value 

How to Establish Your Social Media Marketing Objectives

Whatever your directive is – and what results you’re supposed to achieve – you should always establish clear objectives beforehand and run them by your manager or client. The clearer you are about this from the start, the easier it will be to prove ROI and avoid any misunderstandings. 

The SMART goal-setting template works perfectly in this situation:

Be specific about what you want to achieve, down to the last detail

Make sure your goal is measurable and you know what KPIs you need to track so that you can actually prove your ROI 

Consider your goal carefully to make sure it’s actually attainable and you’re not shooting too high, which will mean you likely won’t be able to prove your ROI (consult your past analytics and results and use your gut instinct to ascertain whether a goal is truly attainable or not) 

Any social media objective should be relevant to that businesses’ marketing objectives – if the brand wants to raise awareness of their company, then your social media goals should reflect that

And finally, every goal should be time-bound – in other words — it needs a deadline! 

In short, SMART stands for:

Specific

Measurable

Attainable 

Relevant

And time-bound 

Establish your KPIs

As I mentioned before, one of the essential aspects of a good objective is that it needs to be measurable. 

Once you’ve set an objective and decided that it is in fact, measurable, you should also take the time to establish the exact KPIs you’ll need to monitor in order to prove the success of your objective. Below is a list of the most important and relevant social media KPIs: 

Engagement: likes, comments, shares and retweets and so on

Reach

Traffic back to website/landing page

Conversions made: people signing up for a list

Leads generated 

When your campaign starts, you should also start carefully tracking the relevant KPIs to monitor your performance and optimize it as you go along. Plus, it will help you measure your social media success.

Here are 3 useful social media tools to help you track these KPIs and prove your social media ROI: 1. Google Analytics & the Google Campaign URL Builder

Google Analytics can be one of your best friends when it comes to proving social media ROI. It can track what your social media traffic is doing on your website, as well as tell you how many conversions you’ve generated. 

To start leveraging Google Analytics to its full potential, make sure to create relevant conversion goals first. You can set up to 20 different conversion goals by going to Admin and clicking on Goals:

Set up different conversion goals in the Google Analytics admin.

As you can see above, you have multiple options for templates so that you can measure all kinds of conversions:

Making a reservation or an appointment

Buying or paying for something

Signing up for your email list

Checking out your contact page

Playing a certain media, and more 

Select the template you want to use (although you can also start from scratch) and follow the instructions to set up your conversion goals. As I mentioned earlier, you’re not allowed unlimited goals, so you might have to replace older ones that are no longer relevant whenever you have a new goal to track (like a new service you’re offering, or a different email list). 

Once you’ve created your goals, you’ll be able to track them for all of your traffic including, of course, your social media traffic. 

Then, when you head over to check your social media traffic in Google Analytics, you’ll also see a conversion rate for each of your social networks which will help you understand the quality of your traffic and help you focus on the social networks that drive results. 

Better yet, you’ll be able to see actual ROI from social media conversions. However, in order to have this information, you need give your conversion goals a monetary value when you set them up. For example, an email sign up might be worth $10, while buying something from you could be the average product or service price. 

Another way to leverage Google Analytics is to use UTM tracking links on your social media – you can create them using the Google Campaign URL Builder:

Create your tracking URLs with Google Campaign URL Builder.

Using UTM tracking links will allow you to really narrow down your findings, much more so than Google Analytics can on its own. For example, you can see which Facebook groups brought the most traffic or what kind of results a specific social media campaign brought in (traffic, conversions, etc.). 

Once you’ve set up these tracking links and started using them, you can track them in your Google Analytics account, under Acquisition – Campaigns. 

2. Agorapulse

Agorapulse has several useful features for tracking social media ROI and success, beyond the usual social media analytics: 

A social media ROI calculator for Facebook Pages

A built-in UTM link builder with dynamic features

First, let’s look at the ROI calculator. The tool uses 3 metrics to help determine an accurate ROI:

The number of engaged fans

The impressions you’ve generated

And the link clicks you got on your Page

The tool starts out with default values for each ($1/€1 for an engaged fan, $5/€5 for impressions and $1/€1 for clicks); it syncs its data on a daily basis and automatically generates your ROI value, broken down as seen in the screenshot below:

That said, you can always customize the monetary values for each in order to more accurately report your results: 

Discuss these values with clients/managers/etc. to come to a mutual agreement over the value of these metrics and you’ll then be able to automatically generate a Page’s ROI any time you need it. All that’s left to do is keep an eye on your results so you can change up your social media strategy when needed if you’re not getting enough positive results. 

Beyond that, you also have access to social media analytics for multiple major social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.), as well as the ability to export your reports. That said, the feature that I most want to talk about is the built-in UTM builder; this option will appear every time you upload a new update with a link:

Once you turn on UTM tracking, you can customize the parameters to your liking and even add extra parameters beyond the usual suspects (source, medium and campaign). And like before, you can track the results with your web analytics. 

This feature will allow you to easily add UTM tracking links (and shorten them automatically if you’ve also connected your Bit.ly account) to each and every link you share; even better, if you’re sharing a link to multiple networks and want to save quite a bit of time, you can select the “Dynamic” option under “Type” and Agorapulse will automatically select the correct social network, medium and profile and them to each UTM link.

To sum up, you can use these UTM tracking links in a variety of ways, when it comes to measuring your results (as they are also excellent tools for testing your social media):

To see where exactly your traffic is coming from (not just the social network as a whole but specific traffic sources, such as groups, updates and so on) 

To see exactly how many conversions you’ve generated and what your ROI is from these conversions (but, as I mentioned before, you also need to set up the right conversion goals in Google Analytics) 

Beyond that, you can get creative and use them in other ways too. For example, bra company Brayola often uses shortened UTM links whenever they direct people to their products, sales, offers, etc. within ad comments:

This way, they’re not just tracking results from the actual ad, but also from any comments happening. After all, it’s still an ROI from social media and by using the UTM links they can actually track to see if that comment helped them make a conversion or sale. 

3. Cyfe

As you might recall from earlier, it’s good practice to monitor your social media KPIs all the time, in order to optimize your campaigns on the go – with the goal of improving your results so that you can reach your objectives.

You can do so very easily with a business dashboard such as Cyfe. Basically, it’s a dashboard that you can connect to your social media analytics (Twitter Analytics, Facebook Insights, etc.) and use it to constantly monitor the KPIs you want. 

You can pull data from your social networks by using their pre-built widgets; click on “add widget” and then on Social Media to see what options you have:

As you can see, you can track pretty much any major social network (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, etc.), as well as your Bit.ly shares and clicks and Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook ads. 

Once you’ve taken the time to set it up, all you have to do is log into your dashboard to see how your results are evolving – use it not just to monitor these results, but also to help you put together your ROI and social media reports, using the data provided for the relevant social network.

Conclusion

With the right tools at your disposal and a strategy put in place to help you calculate your ROI, measuring your social media success doesn’t have to be the challenging feat that it might appear at the first sight. All you have to do is remember the steps you need to take in order to accurately measure your ROI:

Setting SMART objectives for your social media campaigns and strategies

Establishing what KPIs you’ll need to track in order to measure your objectives’ success

Clarifying what conversions you need to focus on and setting up the right conversion goals in Google Analytics

Leveraging useful tools to help you track your social media metrics and KPIs and calculate your ROI

What are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced when having to prove social media ROI? What is your strategy like and what types of tools do you use?   

The post Social Media ROI: How to Prove Your Efforts Are Paying Off appeared first on Convince and Convert: Social Media Consulting and Content Marketing Consulting.

http://bit.ly/2FibM6b

[kraussoutene]

Social Media ROI: How to Prove Your Efforts Are Paying Off

One of the most difficult parts of social media marketing is actually proving its ROI. It’s easy to throw numbers around – likes, new followers, comments and so on – but how do you actually prove your return on investment from social media? 

How do you demonstrate that your work is bringing in revenue or helping the brand reach its marketing and business objectives? 

In this post, I’m going to share some of my best and most effective tips, tricks and tools to help prove your social media ROI. Let’s go.

Vanity Metrics vs. Actionable Metrics: What’s the Difference?

“Vanity metrics” is a term that’s thrown around a lot, but what does it actually mean in the context of social media marketing, and how is it relevant to measuring and proving your ROI?

What Are Vanity Metrics?

Vanity metrics, as the name suggests, are metrics that might make you feel good about yourself – such as generating a bunch of likes on an update or having a large number of fans and followers – but if the metrics aren’t actually relevant to your specific social media marketing objectives (usually, the one’s management or clients ask for), then they are simply vanity metrics. They might look good on paper (or that PDF report you have to send regularly), but in the grand scheme of things, they don’t really matter much to the bottom line. 

Or, another way to look at vanity metrics is as metrics that don’t show a direct ROI, such as clicks, traffic and conversions made, which are “actionable metrics”. 

This isn’t to say that followers, likes, comments and so on aren’t important or relevant. In fact, depending on what your marketing objectives are, they might even be the most relevant stats you have. But in most cases, businesses care much more about results that they can actually understand from their point of view: a surge in traffic to their website, people signing up to their , social media fans buying their products or services or inquiring about them and so on. 

Because of this, the way you prove your social media ROI, depends on your objectives:

For objectives like brand awareness, engagement and so on, you can prove ROI simply by reaching objectives (for example, if your objective is to generate 200 new followers in 30 days, then you’ve proven ROI by reaching that goal). Alternatively, you can also assign these types of metrics a certain value. For example, a new follower might be worth $5, while a like could be worth $1.

For quantifiable objectives like conversions and sales made, you can be much more accurate about actual return on investment, as conversions and sales have a much clearer monetary value 

How to Establish Your Social Media Marketing Objectives

Whatever your directive is – and what results you’re supposed to achieve – you should always establish clear objectives beforehand and run them by your manager or client. The clearer you are about this from the start, the easier it will be to prove ROI and avoid any misunderstandings. 

The SMART goal-setting template works perfectly in this situation:

Be specific about what you want to achieve, down to the last detail

Make sure your goal is measurable and you know what KPIs you need to track so that you can actually prove your ROI 

Consider your goal carefully to make sure it’s actually attainable and you’re not shooting too high, which will mean you likely won’t be able to prove your ROI (consult your past analytics and results and use your gut instinct to ascertain whether a goal is truly attainable or not) 

Any social media objective should be relevant to that businesses’ marketing objectives – if the brand wants to raise awareness of their company, then your social media goals should reflect that

And finally, every goal should be time-bound – in other words — it needs a deadline! 

In short, SMART stands for:

Specific

Measurable

Attainable 

Relevant

And time-bound 

Establish your KPIs

As I mentioned before, one of the essential aspects of a good objective is that it needs to be measurable. 

Once you’ve set an objective and decided that it is in fact, measurable, you should also take the time to establish the exact KPIs you’ll need to monitor in order to prove the success of your objective. Below is a list of the most important and relevant social media KPIs: 

Engagement: likes, comments, shares and retweets and so on

Reach

Traffic back to website/landing page

Conversions made: people signing up for a list

Leads generated 

When your campaign starts, you should also start carefully tracking the relevant KPIs to monitor your performance and optimize it as you go along. Plus, it will help you measure your social media success.

Here are 3 useful social media tools to help you track these KPIs and prove your social media ROI: 1. Google Analytics & the Google Campaign URL Builder

Google Analytics can be one of your best friends when it comes to proving social media ROI. It can track what your social media traffic is doing on your website, as well as tell you how many conversions you’ve generated. 

To start leveraging Google Analytics to its full potential, make sure to create relevant conversion goals first. You can set up to 20 different conversion goals by going to Admin and clicking on Goals:

Set up different conversion goals in the Google Analytics admin.

As you can see above, you have multiple options for templates so that you can measure all kinds of conversions:

Making a reservation or an appointment

Buying or paying for something

Signing up for your email list

Checking out your contact page

Playing a certain media, and more 

Select the template you want to use (although you can also start from scratch) and follow the instructions to set up your conversion goals. As I mentioned earlier, you’re not allowed unlimited goals, so you might have to replace older ones that are no longer relevant whenever you have a new goal to track (like a new service you’re offering, or a different email list). 

Once you’ve created your goals, you’ll be able to track them for all of your traffic including, of course, your social media traffic. 

Then, when you head over to check your social media traffic in Google Analytics, you’ll also see a conversion rate for each of your social networks which will help you understand the quality of your traffic and help you focus on the social networks that drive results. 

Better yet, you’ll be able to see actual ROI from social media conversions. However, in order to have this information, you need give your conversion goals a monetary value when you set them up. For example, an email sign up might be worth $10, while buying something from you could be the average product or service price. 

Another way to leverage Google Analytics is to use UTM tracking links on your social media – you can create them using the Google Campaign URL Builder:

Create your tracking URLs with Google Campaign URL Builder.

Using UTM tracking links will allow you to really narrow down your findings, much more so than Google Analytics can on its own. For example, you can see which Facebook groups brought the most traffic or what kind of results a specific social media campaign brought in (traffic, conversions, etc.). 

Once you’ve set up these tracking links and started using them, you can track them in your Google Analytics account, under Acquisition – Campaigns. 

2. Agorapulse

Agorapulse has several useful features for tracking social media ROI and success, beyond the usual social media analytics: 

A social media ROI calculator for Facebook Pages

A built-in UTM link builder with dynamic features

First, let’s look at the ROI calculator. The tool uses 3 metrics to help determine an accurate ROI:

The number of engaged fans

The impressions you’ve generated

And the link clicks you got on your Page

The tool starts out with default values for each ($1/€1 for an engaged fan, $5/€5 for impressions and $1/€1 for clicks); it syncs its data on a daily basis and automatically generates your ROI value, broken down as seen in the screenshot below:

That said, you can always customize the monetary values for each in order to more accurately report your results: 

Discuss these values with clients/managers/etc. to come to a mutual agreement over the value of these metrics and you’ll then be able to automatically generate a Page’s ROI any time you need it. All that’s left to do is keep an eye on your results so you can change up your social media strategy when needed if you’re not getting enough positive results. 

Beyond that, you also have access to social media analytics for multiple major social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.), as well as the ability to export your reports. That said, the feature that I most want to talk about is the built-in UTM builder; this option will appear every time you upload a new update with a link:

Once you turn on UTM tracking, you can customize the parameters to your liking and even add extra parameters beyond the usual suspects (source, medium and campaign). And like before, you can track the results with your web analytics. 

This feature will allow you to easily add UTM tracking links (and shorten them automatically if you’ve also connected your Bit.ly account) to each and every link you share; even better, if you’re sharing a link to multiple networks and want to save quite a bit of time, you can select the “Dynamic” option under “Type” and Agorapulse will automatically select the correct social network, medium and profile and them to each UTM link.

To sum up, you can use these UTM tracking links in a variety of ways, when it comes to measuring your results (as they are also excellent tools for testing your social media):

To see where exactly your traffic is coming from (not just the social network as a whole but specific traffic sources, such as groups, updates and so on) 

To see exactly how many conversions you’ve generated and what your ROI is from these conversions (but, as I mentioned before, you also need to set up the right conversion goals in Google Analytics) 

Beyond that, you can get creative and use them in other ways too. For example, bra company Brayola often uses shortened UTM links whenever they direct people to their products, sales, offers, etc. within ad comments:

This way, they’re not just tracking results from the actual ad, but also from any comments happening. After all, it’s still an ROI from social media and by using the UTM links they can actually track to see if that comment helped them make a conversion or sale. 

3. Cyfe

As you might recall from earlier, it’s good practice to monitor your social media KPIs all the time, in order to optimize your campaigns on the go – with the goal of improving your results so that you can reach your objectives.

You can do so very easily with a business dashboard such as Cyfe. Basically, it’s a dashboard that you can connect to your social media analytics (Twitter Analytics, Facebook Insights, etc.) and use it to constantly monitor the KPIs you want. 

You can pull data from your social networks by using their pre-built widgets; click on “add widget” and then on Social Media to see what options you have:

As you can see, you can track pretty much any major social network (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, etc.), as well as your Bit.ly shares and clicks and Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook ads. 

Once you’ve taken the time to set it up, all you have to do is log into your dashboard to see how your results are evolving – use it not just to monitor these results, but also to help you put together your ROI and social media reports, using the data provided for the relevant social network.

Conclusion

With the right tools at your disposal and a strategy put in place to help you calculate your ROI, measuring your social media success doesn’t have to be the challenging feat that it might appear at the first sight. All you have to do is remember the steps you need to take in order to accurately measure your ROI:

Setting SMART objectives for your social media campaigns and strategies

Establishing what KPIs you’ll need to track in order to measure your objectives’ success

Clarifying what conversions you need to focus on and setting up the right conversion goals in Google Analytics

Leveraging useful tools to help you track your social media metrics and KPIs and calculate your ROI

What are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced when having to prove social media ROI? What is your strategy like and what types of tools do you use?   

The post Social Media ROI: How to Prove Your Efforts Are Paying Off appeared first on Convince and Convert: Social Media Consulting and Content Marketing Consulting.

http://bit.ly/2FibM6b

[mercedessharonwo1]

Social Media ROI: How to Prove Your Efforts Are Paying Off

One of the most difficult parts of social media marketing is actually proving its ROI. It’s easy to throw numbers around – likes, new followers, comments and so on – but how do you actually prove your return on investment from social media? 

How do you demonstrate that your work is bringing in revenue or helping the brand reach its marketing and business objectives? 

In this post, I’m going to share some of my best and most effective tips, tricks and tools to help prove your social media ROI. Let’s go.

Vanity Metrics vs. Actionable Metrics: What’s the Difference?

“Vanity metrics” is a term that’s thrown around a lot, but what does it actually mean in the context of social media marketing, and how is it relevant to measuring and proving your ROI?

What Are Vanity Metrics?

Vanity metrics, as the name suggests, are metrics that might make you feel good about yourself – such as generating a bunch of likes on an update or having a large number of fans and followers – but if the metrics aren’t actually relevant to your specific social media marketing objectives (usually, the one’s management or clients ask for), then they are simply vanity metrics. They might look good on paper (or that PDF report you have to send regularly), but in the grand scheme of things, they don’t really matter much to the bottom line. 

Or, another way to look at vanity metrics is as metrics that don’t show a direct ROI, such as clicks, traffic and conversions made, which are “actionable metrics”. 

This isn’t to say that followers, likes, comments and so on aren’t important or relevant. In fact, depending on what your marketing objectives are, they might even be the most relevant stats you have. But in most cases, businesses care much more about results that they can actually understand from their point of view: a surge in traffic to their website, people signing up to their , social media fans buying their products or services or inquiring about them and so on. 

Because of this, the way you prove your social media ROI, depends on your objectives:

For objectives like brand awareness, engagement and so on, you can prove ROI simply by reaching objectives (for example, if your objective is to generate 200 new followers in 30 days, then you’ve proven ROI by reaching that goal). Alternatively, you can also assign these types of metrics a certain value. For example, a new follower might be worth $5, while a like could be worth $1.

For quantifiable objectives like conversions and sales made, you can be much more accurate about actual return on investment, as conversions and sales have a much clearer monetary value 

How to Establish Your Social Media Marketing Objectives

Whatever your directive is – and what results you’re supposed to achieve – you should always establish clear objectives beforehand and run them by your manager or client. The clearer you are about this from the start, the easier it will be to prove ROI and avoid any misunderstandings. 

The SMART goal-setting template works perfectly in this situation:

Be specific about what you want to achieve, down to the last detail

Make sure your goal is measurable and you know what KPIs you need to track so that you can actually prove your ROI 

Consider your goal carefully to make sure it’s actually attainable and you’re not shooting too high, which will mean you likely won’t be able to prove your ROI (consult your past analytics and results and use your gut instinct to ascertain whether a goal is truly attainable or not) 

Any social media objective should be relevant to that businesses’ marketing objectives – if the brand wants to raise awareness of their company, then your social media goals should reflect that

And finally, every goal should be time-bound – in other words — it needs a deadline! 

In short, SMART stands for:

Specific

Measurable

Attainable 

Relevant

And time-bound 

Establish your KPIs

As I mentioned before, one of the essential aspects of a good objective is that it needs to be measurable. 

Once you’ve set an objective and decided that it is in fact, measurable, you should also take the time to establish the exact KPIs you’ll need to monitor in order to prove the success of your objective. Below is a list of the most important and relevant social media KPIs: 

Engagement: likes, comments, shares and retweets and so on

Reach

Traffic back to website/landing page

Conversions made: people signing up for a list

Leads generated 

When your campaign starts, you should also start carefully tracking the relevant KPIs to monitor your performance and optimize it as you go along. Plus, it will help you measure your social media success.

Here are 3 useful social media tools to help you track these KPIs and prove your social media ROI: 1. Google Analytics & the Google Campaign URL Builder

Google Analytics can be one of your best friends when it comes to proving social media ROI. It can track what your social media traffic is doing on your website, as well as tell you how many conversions you’ve generated. 

To start leveraging Google Analytics to its full potential, make sure to create relevant conversion goals first. You can set up to 20 different conversion goals by going to Admin and clicking on Goals:

Set up different conversion goals in the Google Analytics admin.

As you can see above, you have multiple options for templates so that you can measure all kinds of conversions:

Making a reservation or an appointment

Buying or paying for something

Signing up for your email list

Checking out your contact page

Playing a certain media, and more 

Select the template you want to use (although you can also start from scratch) and follow the instructions to set up your conversion goals. As I mentioned earlier, you’re not allowed unlimited goals, so you might have to replace older ones that are no longer relevant whenever you have a new goal to track (like a new service you’re offering, or a different email list). 

Once you’ve created your goals, you’ll be able to track them for all of your traffic including, of course, your social media traffic. 

Then, when you head over to check your social media traffic in Google Analytics, you’ll also see a conversion rate for each of your social networks which will help you understand the quality of your traffic and help you focus on the social networks that drive results. 

Better yet, you’ll be able to see actual ROI from social media conversions. However, in order to have this information, you need give your conversion goals a monetary value when you set them up. For example, an email sign up might be worth $10, while buying something from you could be the average product or service price. 

Another way to leverage Google Analytics is to use UTM tracking links on your social media – you can create them using the Google Campaign URL Builder:

Create your tracking URLs with Google Campaign URL Builder.

Using UTM tracking links will allow you to really narrow down your findings, much more so than Google Analytics can on its own. For example, you can see which Facebook groups brought the most traffic or what kind of results a specific social media campaign brought in (traffic, conversions, etc.). 

Once you’ve set up these tracking links and started using them, you can track them in your Google Analytics account, under Acquisition – Campaigns. 

2. Agorapulse

Agorapulse has several useful features for tracking social media ROI and success, beyond the usual social media analytics: 

A social media ROI calculator for Facebook Pages

A built-in UTM link builder with dynamic features

First, let’s look at the ROI calculator. The tool uses 3 metrics to help determine an accurate ROI:

The number of engaged fans

The impressions you’ve generated

And the link clicks you got on your Page

The tool starts out with default values for each ($1/€1 for an engaged fan, $5/€5 for impressions and $1/€1 for clicks); it syncs its data on a daily basis and automatically generates your ROI value, broken down as seen in the screenshot below:

That said, you can always customize the monetary values for each in order to more accurately report your results: 

Discuss these values with clients/managers/etc. to come to a mutual agreement over the value of these metrics and you’ll then be able to automatically generate a Page’s ROI any time you need it. All that’s left to do is keep an eye on your results so you can change up your social media strategy when needed if you’re not getting enough positive results. 

Beyond that, you also have access to social media analytics for multiple major social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.), as well as the ability to export your reports. That said, the feature that I most want to talk about is the built-in UTM builder; this option will appear every time you upload a new update with a link:

Once you turn on UTM tracking, you can customize the parameters to your liking and even add extra parameters beyond the usual suspects (source, medium and campaign). And like before, you can track the results with your web analytics. 

This feature will allow you to easily add UTM tracking links (and shorten them automatically if you’ve also connected your Bit.ly account) to each and every link you share; even better, if you’re sharing a link to multiple networks and want to save quite a bit of time, you can select the “Dynamic” option under “Type” and Agorapulse will automatically select the correct social network, medium and profile and them to each UTM link.

To sum up, you can use these UTM tracking links in a variety of ways, when it comes to measuring your results (as they are also excellent tools for testing your social media):

To see where exactly your traffic is coming from (not just the social network as a whole but specific traffic sources, such as groups, updates and so on) 

To see exactly how many conversions you’ve generated and what your ROI is from these conversions (but, as I mentioned before, you also need to set up the right conversion goals in Google Analytics) 

Beyond that, you can get creative and use them in other ways too. For example, bra company Brayola often uses shortened UTM links whenever they direct people to their products, sales, offers, etc. within ad comments:

This way, they’re not just tracking results from the actual ad, but also from any comments happening. After all, it’s still an ROI from social media and by using the UTM links they can actually track to see if that comment helped them make a conversion or sale. 

3. Cyfe

As you might recall from earlier, it’s good practice to monitor your social media KPIs all the time, in order to optimize your campaigns on the go – with the goal of improving your results so that you can reach your objectives.

You can do so very easily with a business dashboard such as Cyfe. Basically, it’s a dashboard that you can connect to your social media analytics (Twitter Analytics, Facebook Insights, etc.) and use it to constantly monitor the KPIs you want. 

You can pull data from your social networks by using their pre-built widgets; click on “add widget” and then on Social Media to see what options you have:

As you can see, you can track pretty much any major social network (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, etc.), as well as your Bit.ly shares and clicks and Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook ads. 

Once you’ve taken the time to set it up, all you have to do is log into your dashboard to see how your results are evolving – use it not just to monitor these results, but also to help you put together your ROI and social media reports, using the data provided for the relevant social network.

Conclusion

With the right tools at your disposal and a strategy put in place to help you calculate your ROI, measuring your social media success doesn’t have to be the challenging feat that it might appear at the first sight. All you have to do is remember the steps you need to take in order to accurately measure your ROI:

Setting SMART objectives for your social media campaigns and strategies

Establishing what KPIs you’ll need to track in order to measure your objectives’ success

Clarifying what conversions you need to focus on and setting up the right conversion goals in Google Analytics

Leveraging useful tools to help you track your social media metrics and KPIs and calculate your ROI

What are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced when having to prove social media ROI? What is your strategy like and what types of tools do you use?   

The post Social Media ROI: How to Prove Your Efforts Are Paying Off appeared first on Convince and Convert: Social Media Consulting and Content Marketing Consulting.

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