Social Media - What's the ROI?

As more and more individuals and organizations migrate online, social media has become an increasingly critical medium and tool for any advocacy effort – whether it be pushed by a politician, non-profit organization, or corporation. However, as a relatively new communication medium, social media efforts are still sometimes difficult measure.

My instructor, Alan Rosenblatt, recently provided some insights on what to measure and how to measure it in two Frogloop articles, “Measuring the Impact of your Social Media Program,” and “Rules of Social Media Engagement.” According to Rosenblatt, the most important metrics of any social media program are reach, engagement, and driving traffic home. Here are some key considerations for each:

Reach:

• This is a measure of audience size (e.g., number of facebook fans, twitter followers, etc. – these are the potential viewers of your messages).
• Since more people will see your post than actually click, make sure it packs a punch – and include key messages.
  

Engagement:

• This is the action your audience members take in response to being reached by your messages (reach is useless if you don’t engage your audience!).
• Look for ways to encourage your audience to promote your organization –for instance by re-tweeting messages with links to your URL, commenting on facebook posts, or including you in their “#FollowFriday” recommendations on Twitter.

Driving Web Traffic Home:

• This is the number of unique website visitors or page views.
• Social media posts aren’t particularly likely to drive many users to your website – hence why it’s important to include your key message in the post – but it’s still an important measure of success.

But, all of these are intermediate measures in aiming toward more important ROI end goals, such as policy advancement, public opinion change, fundraising increase, etc. The measures above can help an organization establish correlation between social media tactics and end-goal successes, but cannot establish causality.