How Do We Measure ROI on Social Media?

How Do We Measure ROI on Social Media?

How Do We Measure ROI on Social Media?

I was talking with some friends about social media investment and influencer marketing the other day, making progress towards really figuring out the core components and defining factors of influence and we hit upon a speedbump. With Social Media there is no pre-defined system for measuring ROI. You might have 2,000 tweets, 200 blog posts, and 10 articles all about you, but where is the beef? You can't exactly measure charged sentiment, and you might see a noticeable increase in return- but unless you are solely investing in social media you can't exactly determine where that came from.

So what? Do you make develop some kind of magical formula? Some mythical data parsing software that can track every possible source of return? No. There is none. Do you bug your clients with regular surveys? No. That's not practical. So, again I ask, what? What do you do? Well, I can't really tell you that. There is no system of equations that can solve this problem. What I mean to say is, there isn't a scientific, repeatable set of actions that works for everyone. Maybe you can look at what others do and repeat it with modifications that suit your companies specific necessities. But what you need is to analyze the context of the solution and have constant eyes and ears out on the market that can measure your ROI.

The thing is, you can't define influence. I know in previous articles I've mentioned defining influence and the influencer formula but what I've discovered is that you can't really define it. It was there all along. It's axiomatic. Some companies may lead you to believe that have influencer identifying solutions, but they are leading you wrong. They base that upon numbers. Numbers like tweets and blogs and articles. Links links links. But that isn't influence. Some of the most influential people don't have twitter accounts.

So what's the answer? Context. Context is, as they say, key. The key to everything in social media investment. The goal is to define the context as narrowly as possible.

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