If you are involved in managing social media campaigns, either from an agency or client side perspective, you will probably be familiar with having to justify your channel on a routine basis.

With many online channels such as SEO, PPC and Email marketing it’s a fairly straightforward affair to monitor and feedback on universally accepted KPI’s and metrics. For example, click through rate, conversion rate, impressions, click rate etc etc.

But how do you convince your client or employer that their hard earned money is being spent effectively on social media.

As an Online Marketer, you should strive to provide regular reporting and feedback on your social media campaigns through agreed measures of value, both quantitative and qualitative. These measures can be based on the agreed objectives for the campaign.

The following can be used as a guide for dealing with social media campaign reporting or for how to manage the issue of social media reporting / campaigns.

1. Define Your Metrics for Social Media Success

Before you begin your social media campaign, you must first of all define the metrics that you will use to determine the success or failure of your campaign. These metrics will help both you and your client / organisation visualise where the value or return from your social media campaign will come from before you invest precious money and time in creating facebook / twitter, blogs, videos for YouTube etc.

Your success metrics can be either quantitative or qualitative, or even a mixture of both. As a rough but effective example, lets say you are developing a social media campaign or strategy around a corporate blog.

Your quantitative metrics could be; increased traffic to your website, number of sales leads, number of sign ups to a newsletter/subscription based product, number of sale orders.

Your qualitative metrics could be; engagement with customers, number of blog replies and comments, quality of followers, market research and feedback.

2. Test and Track Your Social Media Success

Throughout the execution of your social media campaign you will need to dedicate some of your time to testing and tracking your success. If you set new or revised goals, on regular basis (weekly or monthly), you should be able to monitor the progress of your social media campaign and therefore make improvements / refinements to your campaign strategy.

Consider utilising simple A/B split testing, or if you are more advanced, multi-variate testing to see what messages or approaches are generating the most enquiries, engagements or connections. Remember to measure the quality of these and not just the quantity.

3. ROI - The Most Important Measure

ROI can be looked at in a number of ways, try not to look at it just in terms of direct sales achieved. Social media is about engagement and therefore you need to view it as a long term investment that can support the sales cycle from need identification right down to purchase.

Social media campaigns add value to your sales and marketing efforts through creating strong, long term relationships through engagement such as blog comments on posts as well as traffic to your website.

Remember that although your results may not immediately show revenue growth, they can add value over the long term which can result in incremental sales over time.

Conclusion

Social media is about relationships and conversations. Like any relationship, building strong bonds takes time and effort to develop and sustain. Therefore think seriously about the effort both monetary and in time that will be required to achieve the results you want and whether the expected return will therefore be worth the investment.

Setting success metrics in the early stages of your campaign, will allow you to identify the value social media can offer your client or business, at the same time as helping you measure the success and demonstrate the benefits of activity to your organisation.