How To Promote Your Business on Social Media

Consumer research shows that one-time customers can become loyal brand fans as a result of interacting with a business on social media. As many as four out of five customers are more likely to choose a brand’s service or product after being exposed to them on social media. Unfortunately, as a recent survey showed, 70% of respondents feel that most brands’ presence on social media is based on a self-centered desire to increase profits rather than showing a commitment to their customers.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about what brand promotion practices your business should avoid on social media in order to get noticed. Now that you know what not to do, the next step is posting content that helps you meet your customers’ expectations, so your business can succeed both online and offline. Here’s our spam-free checklist to help you promote your business on social media.

How to promote your business on social media without being “spammy”

❑ Use the right social network

Are you reaching your target audience on social media? If your business is on LinkedIn but your brand offers products and services for teenagers, your message is not being heard. There is a three-step process to find out more about your audience and where they live on social.

❑ Find out your current channels’ demographics

❑ Find out which channels your desired audience frequents

❑ Either switch channels, focus more efforts on the right one, or use targeted ads to reach your desired audience on the same channel

You can use analytics tools such as Facebook Insights or Twitter Analytics to get to know your social media audience demographics. If you need to target a different group, you can do look for research that tells you more about which social channels are used by different age and gender groups—we found some to help you out.

❑ Take time to set up your social media profiles

Your customers can’t get to know your business if you don’t provide them with the right information. Your profile should be a one stop shop for customers to know the basic details: it should link to your business’s official website, and have appropriate branding on the cover and profile photos (think: if your customer were to plug your business’s name in the search bar, will a recognizable brand image pop up?). The About section or bio on your profile should have a concise, clear description of your main service or product, as well as contact information.

If you think your social media presence can use a makeover, we recently published a handy guide that details all the necessary steps in setting up profiles on all major social media networks.

❑ Cross-promote on all social channels

Now that you have set up a profile, and know where your target audience lives on social media, it’s time to let them know where your brand lives. First, list all your social media profiles in a prominent spot on your website. Visitors on your page should not have to look too hard to see how they can connect with your business. If your business has a blog, make sure you add a sharing button for each social network your brand uses. Finally, include regular messaging on your channels that alerts your followers on one network about the existence of your profiles on other networks—just remember to post in moderation, you don’t want your feed to consist of self-promotion posts.

❑ Find your social voice

I recently talked about the importance of having a distinct voice consistent throughout your social channels. Whatever tone you choose to adopt—whether it’s playful, funny, no-nonsense, or educational—the earlier you decide on your voice, the better the payoff for your brand image on social media. It doesn’t mean that you need to create a superficial persona for your customers—in fact, you should try your best to match their perceptions of your business offline. You should remember to be as polite and attentive to your customers as you would be in a face-to-face conversation, because your interactions on social media can be a deciding factor in the customer’s decision to come back or choose your competitor’s services instead.

❑ Share valuable content with your audience

Don’t sacrifice the quality of your content for your social voice—whether your social media content is funny or serious, it should always be informative and useful to your customers. If a potential customer visits your page and finds nothing but self-promoting messaging, they are less likely to browse or follow your profile; research shows that promotional material is seen as spam and often ignored on social media feeds. Since this is obviously the last thing you want happening, you want to provide value to your followers with your messaging.

If your business has a blog with industry news, it’s a great way to promote both your content and show your brand’s expertise in the field. If there is useful information coming from other sources, however, don’t hesitate to share it from your customers—even if someone else authored the advice, you are still the one who pointed them in the right direction.

❑ Encourage storytelling—and tell stories in return

Invite your customers to share anecdotes or photos related to your brand on social media. Your brand receives attention even if someone included an @mention of your brand without directly addressing you (i.e. starting the Tweet with it, or asking a question, for example), so make sure to join the conversation, whatever the tone of the comment may be.

Edelman’s “brandshare” report finds that two-thirds of surveyed customers found that their interaction with brands was one-sided: for example, they were encouraged to share a personal story as part of a promotional campaign, but the business itself never engaged in storytelling on social media. The absence of personal storytelling from your brand is not only unfair to your customers, it’s also a huge missed opportunity to show off your company culture. Social media presents your customers with a chance to get to know the people behind the business: you can give them a “behind the scenes” look at how your business finds inspiration to be great at what you do. This is a great opportunity to turn your customers into brand advocates by doing what you do best—your job.

Social Media Analytics

1. Don’t just track link clicks, track click-through with bounce rate

If you share original content to social media, you’re probably already tracking how many people click-through to that content. Click-through rates are important as a metric, since they indicate that your social media messaging is compelling enough to spark interest with your audience. But these clicks become a far more telling metric, at least in terms of ROI, when paired with your bounce rate.

Bounce rate refers to the percentage of page visitors who leave your website after only viewing one page. In the case of social media, it would reflect someone clicking on a link you post to Twitter or Facebook, arriving on your website or blog, then leaving without viewing any other content.

Ideally, we all want people to stay on our sites forever (or until they convert—whichever comes first). Bounce rate is an important metric to track for your web properties, in general, but why is bounce rate important as it relates to social media? It allows you to powerfully illustrate your social ROI by comparing it to your other sources of web traffic.

Track the bounce rate of website visitors who came from social networks, and compare that rate to website visitors who visited your site directly, arrived from Google, or arrived from any paid advertising campaigns. If your social media bounce rate is lower than those other sources, you can show your boss that you’re targeting the right people on social media, and the traffic you’re driving is more valuable to the business.

How to track this:

To track this metric, you need to be set up on Google Analytics or another analytics provider. In the case of Google Analytics, you’ll want to go to the “Acquisition” tab, and look under “All Traffic” for the “Channels” segment. Click on the “Bounce Rate” button and it should rank all of the channels from lowest bounce rate to highest.

In the example below, you’d be able to show your boss that social media is less effective than search and email, but more effective than search ads, display ads, and direct traffic to your website. That kind of insight should go a long way as you try to prove the value of social media to your business.

2. Don’t just track web referrals, track share of traffic driven

If search has a bounce rate that’s twice as high as social media, but drives 20 times the traffic, social is still going to look less valuable in comparison. That’s why social media managers need to track more than just the amount of traffic driven, and start tracking the share of traffic driven by social.

Doing this, once again, puts social up against other marketing channels like search or display ads, in order to determine the real value for your business. If you have 100,000 website visitors this month, saying social drove 25,000 website visits might not be as powerful as saying that social drove 25 percent of website traffic this month, second only to search and well ahead of any other channel.

How to track this:

Tracking share of traffic driven can be done in the same place as your bounce rate. Within Google Analytics, under Acquisition and Channels, click on the “Sessions” field. This will rank all of the channels based on the number of sessions they drive. In the column, beside the actual number, you should also be able to see a small percentage figure. This percentage represents the share of traffic being driven by each channel. Easy, peasy.

3. Don’t just track mentions, track social share of voice

Mentions are important because they indicate how much people are actually talking to—and about—your business on social. But this metric becomes a lot more valuable when you use it to show how you stack up against your competitors by tracking your social share of voice.

Put simply, your social share of voice details what percentage of mentions within the industry are about your brand and what percentage are about the competition. This allows you to show your boss two important things: that all of your competitors are also on social media and that you’re doing it better than they are. Through this one metric, you can eliminate doubts about whether it’s worth being on social media (if we’re not there for clients and prospects, you can bet our competitors will be), and show just how well your social efforts are being received. Tracked over time, social share of voice can be a powerful illustration of your social campaigns paying off, as you surpass competitors and become a leader in your industry.

How to track this:

Calculate all the mentions of your brand, as well as those of your competitors. (Hootsuite Analytics can help you see these numbers at a glance, instead of having to add them all up manually.) Then, add them all up to get the total number of industry mentions. To show the number of mentions your brand received as a percentage of that total, just divide your mentions by the total, and multiply that number by 100. Yay for math!

4. Don’t just track comments, track conversation rate

Many social media analytics reports cover how many comments were left on each post. But this is somewhat useless information without any context. Getting an average of 20 comments per post is a lot more impressive if you only have 200 followers, after all. A better way to report on this metric is by calculating your conversation rate, a metric coined by Avinash Kaushik, author and digital marketing evangelist at Google.

Your conversation rate is the ratio of comments per post to the number of overall followers (or Page Likes) you have. You can do this for one of your social networks in particular, or all of them. This helps you determine how much of your audience is compelled to add their voice to the content you post on social. Or as Kaushik puts it: “Is what you are saying interesting enough to spark the most social of all things: a conversation?”

How to track this:

Use Hootsuite Analytics to pull the number of comments you received during your specific reporting period. Divide that number by your total number of followers (or Page Likes). Multiple that number by 100 to get your conversation rate as a percentage.

5. Don’t just track shares, track amplification rate

Kaushik offers a similar metric when it comes to tracking shares. Instead of only tracking the number of times your content is shared on social, your amplification rate measures the ratio of shares per post to the number of overall followers (or Page Likes). By following you, these people have already shown a willingness to associate themselves with your brand, so you’d expect them to also actively share your content as well.

How to track this:

Take the number of times your content was shared (or Retweeted, or repinned, or regrammed—or all of the above) during your reporting period and divide that number by your total number of followers (or Page Likes). Multiple that number by 100 to get your amplification rate as a percentage.

6. Don’t just track likes, track applause rate

Likes are also valuable social media currency, but not when they’re being reported as a stand-alone metric. Kaushik suggests tracking your applause rate instead, the ratio of likes per post to the number of overall followers (or Page Likes) you have. Again, this will provide the context needed to make likes more than just a vanity metric. Your applause rate will let you know exactly how much of your audience is finds your content interesting (or not).

How to track this:

Add up the total number of likes your posts received during your reporting period. (Again, using Hootsuite Analytics to pull these numbers will help avoid a lot of manual math.) Divide that number by the overall number of followers (or Page Likes). Multiple that number by 100 to get your applause rate as a percentage.

7. Don’t just track numbers, track leads

Leads generated by social are one of the most important metrics you can track, since they can be directly tied to revenue. If you’re trying to prove social media’s value to your business, delivering a fresh batch of warm leads is a surefire way to turn the right heads.

How to track this:

Generating measurable leads through social media can be achieved in several different ways:

• Sharing gated content
• Using Hootsuite Campaigns to run a contest with a form fill entry
• Hosting social media events that require registration, like broadcasted Google Hangouts
• Using social media advertising to target prospects with free demos or free trials

Regular content can also generate leads, by driving people to web properties where they eventually tick enough boxes and share enough information to become leads. These leads are, unfortunately, a little harder to track.

The key to tracking leads is ensuring that the links you share are trackable within your marketing automation or analytics software—be it Google Analytics, Marketo, Salesforce or something else. To track the leads you’re generating, every link you share on social media should include a UTM code. This code will follow anyone who clicks that link as they visit your website and become a lead, either right away or later on in their journey. This allows you to attribute leads to individual social media messages or campaigns.

Within Hootsuite, you can add custom UTM parameters to any link you share in the “Compose message” box. To do so, click the link shortener field and then hit the little cog symbol to get to the “Advanced” settings.

You should then see the option to add custom URL parameters by typing a UTM code into the field before shortening your link.

Social Media mission statements

Once you have found out where your target audience lives on social media, and set up social media profiles on the chosen networks, congratulations—you’re almost there! The next step is figuring out your engagement strategy.

To manage your time and resources efficiently, your strategy should require few resources and result in a far reach for your brand on social media. The best way to achieve this is to find a focus for each social media profile your business owns, and determine how this purpose fits into your social media strategy. You can start by creating a mission statement for each social media profile.

Doing so is important because it saves your business from two major social media mistakes: leaving a profile neglected, and automatically posting the same content across all your social channels—which increases the likelihood of your social media audience treating your social messaging as spam. In order to avoid that, you want each profile to serve its unique purpose.

Here is how you can identify a unique purpose and create a mission statement for each social media profile:

You should use all your social networks to engage with your current and potential customers. However, you can’t have always afford to concentrate your social media efforts on the same task—it puts you under the risk of ignoring other needs for your brand’s presence on social media. Specific features of each social media network lend themselves to do certain things better, whether it’s a benefit of visuals, as is the case with Instagram and Pinterest, or a well-defined nature of the network’s audience, such as LinkedIn.

After you identify the unique purpose of each social media profile managed by your business, see how each social network fits into your social media marketing plan by creating a mission statement. Your mission statement includes the description of each social media profile’s purpose, and how this purpose contributes to your business goals.

We will use (social network) for (purpose of this social network) in order to help (business goal).

Record your mission statement and make it accessible to everyone who is responsible for social media management in your business. Whenever you check the progress on your goals, or perform a social media audit, check if your performance on each of the social media profiles fits the mission statement. If you find that the performance on a social network fails to achieve the goals you have set, re-evaluate and update the mission statement.

Facebook

Several social networks offer paid advertising options for businesses. Facebook Insights offers useful information about your social media following, so you can choose your target audience by age, gender, spoken language, and geographical location. The latter targeting dimension is especially powerful, particularly in cases where your business is looking to expand into a new region, or run a promotional campaign in one of the locations. You can choose to design your own Sponsored posts, or boost new or existing posts.

Sample mission statement: We will use Facebook for advertising to target a specific audience in order to help increase sales.

Twitter

As per the unspoken rules of social media engagement, you should be interacting with customers on all of your company’s accounts. However, Twitter’s capability to respond to @mentions and direct messages in real-time lends itself to be your top tool for customer support. If your resources allow it, have a separate Help Twitter handle dedicated solely to your customer inquiries; if not, ensure that the person in charge of your business’s Twitter account is well-connected to the customer support team.

For social savvy customer support teams, applications like Zendesk help create support tickets out of Tweets received on the official Twitter account. You can use Zendesk for Hootsuite application to monitor several accounts, as well as mentions of your company, and assign Tweets that need attention to different team members for faster response times.

Sample mission statement: We will use Twitter for customer service in order to increase customer happiness and promote customer loyalty.

LinkedIn

Since LinkedIn has established itself as the professional social network, use your company’s LinkedIn profile to connect with fellow experts in your field and keep an eye on your competitors. If your company has a blog, LinkedIn is also a great social network to help out your content marketing strategy, as young professionals turn to the professional network to gain industry advice. Use your LinkedIn profile to share industry knowledge through the network’s improved publishing functions.

The prevalent professional tone doesn’t mean you can’t justify being creative with your LinkedIn presence—just take a look at Mattel and Barbie’s official LinkedIn profile. As long as your social media profile is geared towards networking with other professionals in your field, connecting with the community, and promoting brand awareness, you can experiment with the rest of the parameters.

Sample mission statement: We will use LinkedIn for building our company’s professional network to help establish our brand as experts in the field.

Instagram

Instagram has experienced an impressive spike in user growth over the last year, and the visual social network is not showing any signs of slowing down. In addition to the benefits of reaching out to younger audiences (almost ¾ of Instagram daily active usersare teens), Instagram’s highly visual nature and more casual tone lets you share quirkier content on your Instagram profile.

Use your brand’s Instagram account to share videos and photos that offer a glimpse into your company culture. This can be anything from a “behind the scenes” look at the latest project or campaign you are working on, to a typical office scene that exemplifies your core values. You can also use Instagram to recognize outstanding employees, and tell the story of how this individual contributes to the success of your company—it’s important for your customers to know the faces behind the brand.

Sample mission statement: We will use Instagram for promoting and sharing our company culture to help with recruitment and employee happiness.

Google+

There are over 3.5 billion Google searches performed every day. Having a higher pagerank in Google search should always be a priority in your digital marketing plan, and the best way to achieve that is keeping your Google+ page active and up-to-date. Google favours Google+ content, especially if it has been optimized for the right keywords and offers valuable information for a wide audience. Educate yourself on the relationship between SEO, social media and content marketing.

Sample mission statement: We will use Google+ for boosting SEO value of our online content to help increase visibility.

Pinterest

Pinterest has gone a long way from the platform primarily used for foodies and wedding planners—this social network’s superpower is e-commerce. Shopify recently identified Pinterest as one of the leading platforms for social sales. It’s imperative that you get familiar with this virtual pinboard and the best practices of using your Pinterest profile for business. If you’re in the retail or restaurant business, use the network’s visual capabilities to create attractive Pins with your products. If your product is easier to describe with words than pictures, use another highly sharable medium on Pinterest—infographics. Not only will a well-designed infographic help establish you as a knowledgeable figure in the your field, it can also generate more sales from users who find the content useful and want to get to know your brand.

Sample mission statement: We will use Pinterest for sharing high-quality images to help promote our products and increase sales.

A Social Media Audit Template For Social Media Managers

A key part to creating a social media marketing plan is conducting a social media audit. This assesses how well your current social media use works for you. There are many different steps involved when doing a social media audit, so we have put together a social media audit template to help you conduct your first (or second, third, etc.) one more efficiently.

Not sure where to start? To help you navigate the template, we also put together this 6-step guide on how to execute a social media audit.

Creating Social Media Goals

Creating Social Media Goals

The importance of goal-setting cannot be understated—and social media goals are no different. But how to actually achieve those goals is another conversation altogether, and one that’s not talked about as often. So we took the battle-tested S.M.A.R.T. system goal setting model (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Timely) and applied it to the world of social so that you’re not just setting your social media goals, you’re setting yourself up to achieve them.

Make your social media goals specific

Increasing your social media reach, for example, is a great goal to have. But what’s your benchmark for success? Is it 50 followers? Or 500 followers? And on which social network? If the goal is too vague, you’ll never really know what you’re working towards. So develop goals that are clear, specific, and not open to interpretation.

Example

Not Specific: “I will use social media to increase brand awareness.”

Specific: “I will create a campaign of hashtag contests on Twitter to increase brand awareness.”

Set goals that are measurable

Image by Sunny Mama via Flickr CC 2.0 by SA

Maybe you want to use social as a channel for customer service. How do you know how well it’s working? An increase in Tweets? Decreased phone queries and emails over the span of a few months? When it comes to success, the numbers matter. Don’t just know you were successful—know how successful you were.

Example

Not measurable: “I will increase my reach and engagement on social media.”

Measurable: “I aim to increase my reach by 100 followers a week and answer all queries over Twitter within 24 hours.”

Make the goal attainable

We’d never try to talk someone out of punching above their weight. After all, that’s where life’s big wins happen. But short of winning the go-viral lottery, aiming for 300 retweets a week when you have a 500 Twitter followers just isn’t going to happen in even the best of circumstances. Keep your goals challenging, but realistic. #babysteps

Example

Not Attainable: “Double the number of my followers every day on every social network forever.”

Attainable: “Grow my Facebook audience by 25 followers a week, and my Twitter followers by 35 a week for the next quarter.”

Relevance is king

Want to use social media to build your mailing list? Social channels are a tremendous way to accumulate qualified leads. But if that’s your goal, it makes more sense to focus on using social media to drive traffic to your website than, say, staying on top of your Instagram mentions. Make sure that goal is relevant to your business’s success (even if the it’s not as sexy or fun).

Example

Not relevant: “I will use Instagram posts to increase web enquiries for my logistics business.”

Relevant: “I will use Instagram as a way for me to present my stationery brand in a fun, visual way and increase engagement with my community.”

Keep it timely

Image via zoutedrop under CC by 2.0

You’ve ticked all the boxes and your social media goals are locked, loaded, and ready for lift-off. Now all you have to do is achieve them. By committing to a time frame in which that’s going to happen, you’ll keep the oft-repeated chorus of “I’ll do it tomorrow.” at bay. A hard deadline keeps you accountable.

Example

Not timely: “I will increase my Facebook followers by 100,000.”

Timely: “I will increase my Facebook followers by 100,000 by Q4.”

You might be implementing a large-scale strategy to improve international brand sentiment of a Fortune 500 over social media. Or maybe you’re just trying to drum up some local excitement for your new small business. Big or small—the rules still apply. You’ll dramatically improve your chances of achieving your social media goals (and enjoy all the perks that come with it.)

When it comes to reaching your goals, are you batting a thousand? What rules or tricks have worked for you in the past? And what do you think you could’ve done to improve some of your not-so-stellar results?

Social Media ROI

Measuring the return on your social media investment is no longer optional.

To secure executive buy-in for social marketing strategies—and larger, dedicated budgets—digital and marketing leaders need to confidently demonstrate how social media efforts are contributing to an organization’s broader business goals.

Maturing from an experiment to a core business strategy, social media is now an impactful marketing channel that needs to compete against other channels—for budget, resources, and respect. This means that social, like other channels, has to prove its return on investment.

However, beyond simply proving the impact on the organization, measuring and tracking social media return on investment (ROI) accurately also lets marketers put more time and resources into what’s working, and improve the tactics that aren’t delivering real value. To help you evaluate your social media ROI, we’ve put together the following guide.

What is social media ROI?

No business wants to put money and resources into something that doesn’t pay off. Will the results from the channel make the effort, time, and cost worth it? How will you prove this? Is there content that will perform better and show a higher ROI? How is this going to be measured?

As you can see, measurement is key and you’re going to have to define and prove the importance of social media in terms of ROI. As with most measurement elements, a definition of social media ROI is subjective to the goals your organization has set. Social Media Examiner offers this broad definition: “Social media ROI is defined as a measure of the efficiency of a social media marketing campaign.” Supplementing this definition, the general formula provided for calculating out your social media ROI is given as follows:

Social media ROI = (SM return – SM investment) / SM investment percent.

Like any formula, the math is easy if you have all the variables. In his book “Social Media ROI: Managing and Measuring Social Media Efforts in your Organization,” author Oliver Blanchard explains that the ability to measure financial outcomes by a dollar value is significant because, “The investment, the gain, and the return must be measured in the same currency (the unit of measure of the investment, the gain, and the return must be the same in order for the ROI equation to function), only a financial outcome can qualify as a proper gain or return. In other words, financial outcomes are the culmination of any investment. This is where return is always measured.”

But what if your objectives aren’t easily quantifiable? As social media marketers know, the success of a campaign is not always measurable or quantifiable. To account for this, Blanchard explains that the non-financial outcomes “tell the story by capturingchanges in human behavior.” What kinds of things did your target audience do after exposure to your campaign? Did these actions align with your goals? Where did they fall short? How can they improve for next time?

If you need another way to consider your social media ROI, think about the ratio between cost and gain. As Pagemodo explains, costs are anything being invested in your social media efforts, with some examples being:

• Labor
• Training
• Development
• Social technology
• Agencies and consultants
• Paid media
• Business overhead

For estimating the gain from certain consumer actions (purchases, page views, downloads, email list signups, etc.) Pagemodo suggests you “refer to your internal analytics to better understand the conversion events that happened while social media was running.” These are all areas that can help you define your social media ROI and prove the value to your organization and brand.

Why is measuring ROI important?

If you want your efforts to be taken seriously, it’s crucial to prove their worth. Talk is cheap, so while you could tell your stakeholders or clients about the value of social media campaigns and why you need to dedicate resources to said campaigns, nothing will convince them more than being able to actually show results through ROI. Everything is taken more seriously when there are measurable and specific outcomes, and this is especially true for social media ROI.

Measuring your social media ROI is important for countless reasons, including, but not limited to:

• Proving the value of social media to your organization’s overall goals and business objectives
• Allowing you to clearly see where efforts and resources are being used efficiently
• Enabling you to evaluate where resources are being wasted, or not used as efficiently as possible
• Allowing you to recognize gaps in strategy, key messages, and content
• Showing where your social media budget is being used most effectively, and showing areas where it can be pulled back

As was shared in a social media pro panel, “If your role is to generate sales or leads through social media or your website, then it’s important to track where they are coming from. Being able to track whether organic social media is bringing in more sales than owned social, and vice versa, allows you to evaluate how good or bad your social media efforts are. If you see that organic social media is bringing in more sales than owned, it’s not a bad thing. It just means that your content is sticking, people are wanting to share it more, and it will allow you to know where you need to focus on.”

Setting goals

Now that you know what social media ROI is and why it’s crucial for your business, it’s important to set some goals. As mentioned above, before you are able to measure your social media ROI, you need to know what metrics you are actually  measuring. When pitching your boss and trying to get buy-ins to your strategy, the key is to set social media goals that complement existing business and departmental goals.

If you have set a specific number of leads you’re trying to attain this quarter, set the number of leads you want to specifically be driven by social media. If one of your goals is to increase landing page conversion by 10 percent, ensure that you’re tracking the conversion rate of people who land on the page through social channels. Audit your existing social media performance to establish baseline targets, then set appropriate goals for improvement.

The brand awareness created by social media—seen in vanity metrics including “likes” and “+1s” and “Retweets”—is valuable, but it is not enough. According to Altimeter, only 34 percent of businesses feel that their social strategy is connected to business outcomes. To demonstrate social media’s value, you need to measure social media ROI as it relates to your broader business goals.

Key examples of social media metrics to track include:

• Reach
• Site traffic
• Leads generated
• Sign-ups and conversions
• Revenue generated

It’s important for social data to be relevant to stakeholders within your organization, not just social media practitioners. Tying social media to the big picture by linking it to organizational and departmental goals will help you achieve that.

If you need some help determining goals, we recommend using the S.M.A.R.T goalframework. Explained in more detail through our piece Don’t just create social media goals—reach them, you want to ensure that the goals you are setting are specific, measurable, achievable/attainable, realistic/relevant, and timely. For example, rather than simply saying that you want to increase your engagement, set a numerical value and a deadline for this, such as aiming to have 50 customer interactions per week by the end of your first quarter.

As outlined in our post The Social Media Metrics That Should Matter to Small Businesses, the following are specific social media goals, and the metrics to measure for each, to get you on the right track with your social ROI efforts.

Goal No. 1: Increase social media engagement

Social media metrics to measure: Likes, Shares, Comments, Retweets, Mentions, Favorites

Goal No. 2: Increase customer acquisition on your website

Social media metrics to measure: URL clicks and traffic from social media

Goal No. 3: Increase brand awareness

Social media metrics to measure: Follower growth rate, percentage change over time in followers, Twitter sentiment, reach by region, clicks by region

Validate your ROI

While it’s great to set social media goals and act on them, your job isn’t done until you’ve proven the value of your efforts, which is a challenge for many social media and content marketers. As Moz explains, “according to The CMO Survey 2014, just 15 percent of marketers are able to prove their social media marketing activities has a clear, quantitative impact on helping them fulfill their overall marketing objectives.” Furthermore, an independent study by Altimeter revealed that many organizations avoid focusing on social media ROI because of:

• 56 percent: an inability to tie social media to business outcomes
• 39 percent: a lack of analytics, expertise and/or resources
• 38 percent: poor tools
• 35 percent: inconsistent analytical approaches
• 30 percent: unreliable data

While it may seem difficult at first sight to prove these hesitations wrong, there are numerous tools available to help you. Once you’ve established your social media goals, you’ll need to identify and implement these tools and processes required to measure the ROI on your social media. This may involve adding tracking codes to URLs, building custom landing pages, and more.

There are a variety of social media analytics tools which service to track the diverse metrics you are after. Here are some to consider:

Google Analytics: Track website traffic, on-site conversions, and sign-ups originating from social media campaigns.

Salesforce: Add Salesforce tracking codes to the links you share on social networks. When paired with marketing automation software like Marketo, you’ll be able to track sales leads back to specific campaigns or social messages.

Hootsuite Analytics: Hootsuite offers a variety of analytics tools to help you track your reach, conversions and more. A few noteworthy examples are:

• Hootsuite Insights will help you identify conversations within your industry, your reach, brand sentiment, and much more, with 100 million data sources, real-time results, and an intuitive interface.
• Custom URL parameters allows you to track which social networks and social messaging did or did not drive traffic to your site, blog, or landing page.
• Hootsuite Analytics Reports offer quick snapshots of your reach through metrics like follower growth, total daily URL click-through, and per-post stats for Facebook, Twitter, and more

Calculate your social media ROI

Once you’ve set your goals and chosen your social media analytics tools, it’s time to actually track your social media ROI. The ability to track should be built into everything you do on social media, so you’re never left scrambling to try and prove the success of a campaign.

Creating analytics templates will allow you to track your desired metrics without having to build out custom reports for each campaign. These reports will also present the data in an easily digestible way, allowing you to simply and effectively share your ROI on social media with higher ups in the organization.

You should check your various social media metrics frequently—often daily—to ensure that your social media goals are being met. The lifecycle of social media campaigns is often very short, so you need to stay on top of the data as it happens.  Choose a timeframe that works for you, and stick to it. You can often have reports sent to your email inbox on specific days of the week so you don’t even have to remember to pull reports yourself.

Make adjustments

Once you’ve identified what works and what doesn’t work for your organization on social, it’s time to adjust your strategy. The point of tracking your social media ROI isn’t just to prove your social campaigns are valuable, it’s to increase their value over time. Go back and take a look at the goals of your specific campaign and evaluate how they tie-into the organization’s overall goals.

Due to the short lifecycle of social media campaigns, a failing campaign should be changed and improved as soon as possible. Social media is never static. To meet your social media ROI goals, you’ll need to update and adapt your strategy constantly, taking into account the analytics data you’re tracking. Think about whether your data needs adjusting after calculating your first round of social media ROI, and get back to the drawing board if necessary. The setting of business goals and calculating your social media ROI is not going to be a black and white, one-time event, but rather an ever-changing and evolving process. However measuring your social media ROI gives your organization a valuable insight for not only measuring the success of past campaigns, but in planning for the future.