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At this point in your social media journey you might have stumbled across some great tools for measuring your social media but these tools aren’t upfront about helping you measure your ROI. It can be important to be able to see some financial growth based on the time and effort put into your social media campaigns, because lets face it, social media isn’t exactly free. Here are some tips and tools to help you measure your social media and your ROI.

1.) Establish A Baseline Before Social Media

It is important to have a pretty clear picture of what your average sales and transactions typically look like before allocating lots of resources to social media. Be sure to measure things such as your sales, transactions, and even more specifically sales through your website.

2.) Establish A Clear Goal

Now that you have a better understanding of what your business looks like before social media it is important to have a clear goal in mind before beginning any campaigns. Figure out what is most important, brand awareness, new customers, or higher sales. Once you have determined where to focus it will make your efforts more effective.

3.) Create An Action Chat

Create a daily chart of actions you have taken. By documenting key events in your social media and marketing campaigns you can more easily reference days where you saw a noticeable increase in your sales or transactions.

4.) Using Metrics

Along with your action chart it is important to use some of the valuable tools available to measure your social media, here are a few ways to get started.

Google Analytics

Not only has Google been busy with their new Google + platform, they have also found some time to give their anayltics interface a facelift. When you visit your Google Analytics account you will now see a “new version” link in the top right of your screen. After switching to the new view you are now able to update your Google Analytics code to track Facebook “likes”, “unlikes”, and “sends” as well as Tweets and +1s. Social Media Examiner put together a great tutorial on tracking these social buttons with Google Analytics.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is most widely known for being a twitter platform but it can actually tie in quite a few social media accounts. It is free to sign up and has a pro options for $5.99/mo that offers more features. You can also create custom reports based on the information that matters to you most.

Twendz

Twendz taps into sentiment analysis which helps you determine if those mentions you are getting on twitter are positive or negative. Sentiment analysis is another useful thing to monitor before starting a new campaign to compare to afterwards.

5.) Compare & Graph

Once you have spent some time tracking your social media you are now ready to compare all of your gathered social media data against the data you had collected before launching any new campaigns. You should now be able to effectively see how a special appearance in a twitter chat or the launch of a custom landing tab on your Facebook fan page has effected your website traffic, sales, and transactions.

Have you had success measuring your social media ROI? Share your experiences, tips, and resources in the comments bellow!

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