01 Mar Mistake #10: Failing to Measure Your ROI (Return on Investment) – Top 10 Social Media Mistakes

Do you know if social media works for you? Do you know whether Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn produces more sales? Have you tested and tracked your efforts when compared to results? If not, you’re guilty of making mistake number 10.

Going hand in hand with this mistake is that many marketers will look at how many Twitter followers or Facebook Fans they have and if it’s a fairly high number they think they’re doing something right and getting results. While these are important stats to know because you do want to be building your number of followers/fans, they’re not the main thing you should be looking at to figure out if you’re getting a good ROI.

Some people wonder if it’s even possible to measure social media ROI and the answer is yes. In fact, there are several different ways you can do this. Here are four easy ways that you can measure your social media marketing ROI:

1. Traffic – one of the main goals you probably have with social media is that you ultimately want to increase traffic to your site. Keep an eye on your analytics (if you use Google Analytics) or other stats that will give you the information you need to track your traffic. Checking your traffic stats is probably one of the easiest ways to monitor your social media marketing ROI.

2. Sales – another way to track your social media ROI is to pay attention to whether the increased traffic (from social media) is converting into sales. Ultimately you want that traffic converting into a sale.

3. Unique links – don’t use the same link on Facebook that you use on Twitter. Set up unique links that you can use on the different social media platforms. This will help you track the traffic that’s coming from each site.

4. Social media only specials – you can set up different landing pages on your website for each of the social media sites your running a special on. This doesn’t mean you have to run a different ad for each individual social media site (although you can). For example, let’s say you’re running a Twitter special and a Facebook special, all you’ll do is set up two different landing pages on your website so you know whether the traffic came from Twitter or Facebook. This will help you be able to easier track the ROI of each of the social media offers.

There are other ways you can gauge social media ROI, it’s just a matter of figuring out how you want to track things. But keep in mind that until you have a goal in mind of what you want your results to be, you won’t be able to know whether or not social media is producing positive results for you.

Conclusion

Perhaps even more damaging to your business than these 10 social media mistakes is not using social media at all. It’s clear that this is one trend that is not going to go away, so it’s critical for every small business to learn to use social networking to your advantage.

If you’ve been active in social media for a while, now is the time to look at your strategies and take steps to eliminate what’s not working, and to start improving your efforts. With these top 10 mistakes in mind, you’re in a good position to greatly increase your social media effectiveness – and have some fun doing it!