Measuring the Return on Investment of Social Media

Return on Investment is one of the most hotly debated aspects of communication and especially social media measurement.

But like any other department, social media demands resources.  While it makes sense to measure soft numbers like social media’s impact on awareness, knowledge, interest, relevance, relationship, intent to purchase and more, it is also important to calculate true return on investment. There is a lot of talk about how companies and individuals can measure the return on investment of these channels, but very few have set up a system to regularly connect sales to social media activity.

Jason Lauritzen, Social Media Specialist for Houston Methodist, a seven-hospital system with over 15,000 employees, has done just that. Through the use of marketing funnels in Google Analytics (How To Video for setting up funnels), and integration with data from the call center(simple Excel charts), he can now attribute revenue in the hospital to social media activity. One of the ways they attribute is by making sure to tag all links sent out in social media.

Related: How to Use Google Analytics URL Builder to Track Online Campaigns and Show Value

In the video below, Jason talks about the following:

• How to determine what constitutes ROI for your company and how to calculate it
• What to do if you don’t have a product that you sell online
• How to set up a system to connect social media to sales or business actions
• What the obstacles are for measuring the ROI of social media

Also, check out the transcript of the talk on How To Measure Social Media ROI on Storify, which was done by Sandra Fernandez.

Measuring the ROI of Social Media

Direct link to measurement ROI video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iY9zZoJTzms

Photo Credit: Alec Bieniawski