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Every time you meet Digital Professional who knows his domain you would have heard “Social Media is all about building relationships and Sales are a by-product of the engagements resulting from these relationships”. And I am sure the next few questions on your mind will be

What am going to do with all the relationships if it does not translate into business?

How do I translate these relationships into business and whats going to be my ROI?

How am I supposed to calculate Social Media ROI?

Now you know social media is working for many brands and maybe you also saw your competitor implementing social media marketing campaigns – you don’t want to miss out on the opportunity. As one of the early adopter of social media you might just have an edge over competition, right!

So you give a thumbs-up yes to a trial campaign using Facebook but the question remained How do you figure out that 25,000 you will spend on Facebook was worth the effort and the money? There is no absolute technology which allow you to do that just like you cannot know how many people saw your prime location hoarding and purchased your product / service because they saw it.

Having said that, let me try to highlight a few simple ways to track ROI from social media campaigns which you can employ anytime.

Campaign specific promo Coupons and Offer codes

Offer a coupon only on one medium. You can thus know with 100% accuracy that every coupon that customers used came from Facebook or from someone who got it from his / her friend but nonetheless from facebook. Facebook has introduced a its own version of coupons in called ‘Offers’. The process is rather simple and it better be if Facebook wants marketers to use the platform J. As per a facebook product manager the offer mechanism allows online stores to quickly understand where the source of traffic.

Using unique phone / mobile numbers

Getting a mobile number is not difficult these days. You can book unique mobile numbers for specific campaigns / offers. These can be assigned to each campaign or offer by the medium you intened to use for e.g. Facebook, Twitter etc The calls will enable you to track which medium works best for a specific offer.

Facebook’s Conversion Measurement tool

This is a relatively new tool introduced by facebook for measuring ROI. The tools lets advertisers track the behavior of people who click an ad on facebook. If a user clicks on an FB ad and then goes to your website and initiates action like Sale, registration, enquiry, download etc then you will be able to track it. Activating conversion measurement calls for pasting a few lines of code on your webpages and is not difficult.

Google Analytics

Understanding traffic sources is very critical to campaign management success in online marketing. Analytics may not be able to what people are buying if they have come from a social media page but you will know for sure if traffic is coming from social platforms like Twitter, Facebook or Pinterest.

Isolate Campaigns

This though simplest is a difficult one to implement especially when your marketing is in full flow. You can stop all marketing activities and run a social media campaign for a few weeks on each of the social platforms and see for yourself if there is any change in sales of your products. Do remember you are going to a targeted audience and your offering, creatives etc have to meet expectations for them to work.

I hope the above methods will give you a snapshot of how well your social media marketing is working thought in a limited way. Social media ROI may not be visible immediately in may cases but do remember that your brand is being seen, engaged with and shared. That’s high value for money given the very lost cost of engaging prospects using social media campaigns.