6 simple ways to prove social media ROI to senior management

Social media strategies can complement PR efforts perfectly, and as publishers continue to ramp up their online content – the opportunities to leverage your outreach via social media soar.

Now, social networks act as first-stop sources of breaking news, offering unparalled access to journalists and as-yet unseen speed of coverage.

Yet clearly our sector still struggles to quantify the impact of social media efforts to senior management. We’re therefore grateful to socialmediaexaminer.com for coming up with a useful take on ways to measure the ROI of social media activity, summarised here.

1. Cost per impression

When you show the change in the cost per impression with and without social media, you can make a compelling case for the impact of social media on your PR strategy. On Facebook, you can get impression data on Facebook Insights. It’s trickier to measure on Twitter, but try TweetReach and Simply Measured to assess the reach of your messages.

2. Cost per engagement

Social channels are unbeaten for engagement, which can be measured with shares, clicks, comments, likes and mentions. Aggregate how people engaged with content and divide this figure by the cost to determine the cost per engagement.

3. Cost per click

Online PR drives users to click on links shared via social media, delivering inexpensive clicks on your messages. It’s easy enough to count the clicks generated through your own messaging efforts (use stats from your URL shortener). Add to the mix articles containing links to your corporate website, and page views of the article from the publication that had a social media site’s referring URL.

Take the total number of clicks and divide them by the cost of the outreach to determine the cost per click.

4. Cost per site visitor

Measuring the cost per visitor site across channels is a very simple way to show the positive impact of social media. To calculate it, take the total number of website visits generated and divide it by the total cost of the outreach. How do the costs compare to your online advertising and SEO costs?

5. Cost per inbound link

Adding ‘backlinks’ to media articles can drive traffic to a website. So, another good metric is cost per inbound link, calculated by taking the total number of inbound links the article generated and dividing it by the total cost of the campaign.

6. Cost per subscriber

It’s one thing to woo visitors to your website, but they are worth so much more if they subscribe with their email addresses for follow-up marketing once there. The cost per subscriber is a useful metric for understanding how online PR performs in relation to your overall marketing spend. To calculate, take the total number of new subscribers generated and divide it by the cost of the outreach.

You can use these metrics to determine how social media and PR complement each other to deliver relatively inexpensive results. The goal, according to Social Media Examiner, is not to prove that social media is better than other marketing channels, but to demonstrate how adding social media to the mix drives PR performance.