Social Media ROI: Key Performance Indicators and Analytics Tools at #SMX #SocialMedia Marketing

Day 2 at SMX Social Media Marketing was dominated by discussion around measuring return-on-investment (ROI), a particularly elusive part of the marketing process.  Though there was a lot of great recommendations on which key performance indicators should help you determine what’s right for your campaign – depending on your goals – and tons of information on the different tools that are out there, there was still a lot of head scratching going on when it came down to identifying a definitive formula that would reveal how successful a campaign was.

Search Engine Land’s Chris Sherman offered his opinion on why ROI continues to be such a hard thing to define within the emerging social media marketing industry: we’ve become so accustomed to the granular data we’re able to glean from pay-per-click campaigns, but social media is bringing us full circle back to the days when everyone knew that advertising on TV was an absolute must, but had no way to measure how effective it was.

Here’s a quick summary of the info from yesterday’s sessions (I apologize for the lateness, I was wrestling with connectivity issues the entire time I was at the hotel, though it seems the Phoenix airport wifi works just fine!):

Mary Morud’s presentation (SMX.ppt) and list of social media tools (Social Tools XLS) is available via the left nav on aimClear’s Facebook page… go “Like” them and you’ll have access to both.

Adam Ware from SwellPath offered his advice on designing a campaign to deliver the data that will be most useful to you.

Key performance indicators (KPIs)

• Reach awareness
• Sign Ups
• Leads
• Sales in dollars
• Things that “move the needle”

Key Metrics: the numbers that funnel into your KPIs

• Click-throughs
• Fans
• Retweets
• Visits

Courney Seiter from Raven Internet Marketing made the following recommendations:

Set your strategy

Determine the goals of what you want to accomplish in social media… are you just listening in to monitor sentiment, or are you trying to generate leads and sales?  What you want to do will help inform how you approach your campaigns.

Curate great content

Sick to the 80-20 rule of social media promotion: 80% should consist of anything but  your own stuff, the remaining 20% is your own info.

Optimize and measure

Which tools will be most relevant to you will depend on what you’re goals are.  To see some of Courtney’s recommendations, check out her SMX presentation on Slideshare.

Build Your Community

Engage with customers and influencers, find out who’s talking about your brand and where.

For more on Raven, visit their site: ImASocialTool.com.

There were a few more presentations covering social media strategy and best practices, but I’ve got to hop on a plane back to SeaTac and I don’t know that I’ll have it done before we board, so I’ll cut this one off here for the sake of publishing it sooner than later. 

Keep an eye out for my final post covering SMX Social Media Marketing!