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Writer's pictureLauren Hatch

Beyond Likes and Shares: Measuring Your True Social Media ROI

Updated: Aug 21



It's all about looking at the right social media numbers to grow a business but which are right?

Social media has become an indispensable tool for businesses looking to connect with their audience, build brand awareness, and drive sales. It's the go-to platform for many businesses to showcase their brand, engage with their audience, and ultimately drive business growth. However, while it’s easy to get caught up in the number of likes, shares, and comments your posts receive, these vanity metrics don't always provide a complete picture of your social media efforts' effectiveness. In today’s data-driven world, it's essential to look beyond surface-level engagement and focus on metrics that truly reflect your social media return on investment (ROI). This comprehensive guide will walk you through advanced methods for measuring social media ROI, setting meaningful KPIs, tracking conversions, calculating customer lifetime value, and utilizing analytics tools to demonstrate the real impact of your social media strategy on business growth.


The Limitations of Vanity Metrics

Vanity metrics—such as likes, shares, and follower counts—are often the first numbers marketers and business owners look at when evaluating the success of their social media campaigns. These metrics are easily visible and provide instant gratification. After all, seeing a post with thousands of likes can feel like a win. However, while these metrics can provide a quick snapshot of engagement, they rarely offer insights into the actual value your social media efforts are bringing to your business.


Vanity metrics are easy to inflate, and they don’t always correlate with meaningful outcomes like increased sales or customer retention. For example, a post might receive thousands of likes, but if those likes don’t translate into website visits, email signups, or purchases, they don’t contribute to your bottom line. The allure of vanity metrics can often lead businesses to focus on the wrong goals, neglecting the deeper, more impactful metrics that actually drive business growth.


To truly understand the impact of your social media strategy, you need to dig deeper into metrics that align with your business goals and contribute to long-term success. This means moving away from metrics that simply make you feel good and towards those that can give you actionable insights.


Setting Meaningful Social Media KPIs

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are the specific metrics you choose to measure the success of your social media strategy. Unlike vanity metrics, meaningful KPIs are closely tied to your business objectives and can provide valuable insights into how your social media efforts are contributing to those goals. The key is to identify KPIs that are not only measurable but also directly related to the growth and sustainability of your business.


Defining Your Social Media KPIs

When setting social media KPIs, it’s important to align them with your broader business objectives. For example, if your goal is to increase brand awareness, you might focus on KPIs like reach, impressions, and share of voice. These metrics help you understand how widely your content is being seen and how often your brand is being talked about.


If your goal is to drive sales, you might track metrics like conversion rate, click-through rate (CTR), and revenue generated from social media channels. These KPIs provide a direct link between your social media efforts and the financial performance of your business. By focusing on these metrics, you can more accurately measure the effectiveness of your campaigns and make informed decisions about where to allocate your resources.

Here are some examples of meaningful social media KPIs:


  • Reach and Impressions: Measure how many people see your content and how often they see it. This is particularly important for brand awareness campaigns where visibility is key.

  • Engagement Rate: Track the percentage of your audience that interacts with your content through likes, shares, comments, and clicks. Engagement is a strong indicator of how well your content resonates with your audience.

  • Conversion Rate: Measure the percentage of social media users who take a desired action, such as making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or filling out a contact form. Conversions are a direct reflection of how effective your social media content is at driving business goals.

  • Click-Through Rate (CTR): Track the percentage of users who click on a link in your social media post, leading them to your website or landing page. A high CTR indicates that your content is compelling and relevant to your audience.

  • Revenue Generated: Calculate the total revenue directly attributed to your social media campaigns. This is perhaps the most straightforward KPI, directly linking your social media efforts to financial outcomes.


By focusing on these KPIs, you can ensure that your social media efforts are aligned with your business goals and contribute to your overall success.


Tracking Conversions and Attribution

Once you’ve established your social media KPIs, the next step is to track conversions and attribute them to your social media efforts accurately. Conversion tracking allows you to measure the actions users take after interacting with your social media content, such as making a purchase, signing up for a webinar, or downloading a resource.


Understanding Conversion Attribution

Attribution models help you determine which social media interactions contributed to a conversion. This is particularly important when users engage with your brand multiple times before converting. For example, a user might first learn about your brand through a social media ad, later visit your website through an organic search, and finally make a purchase after receiving an email. Attribution models help you assign credit to each touchpoint in the user’s journey.


Some common attribution models include:

  • Last-Click Attribution: Assigns all credit to the last interaction before the conversion. This model is straightforward but can oversimplify the customer journey by ignoring earlier interactions.

  • First-Click Attribution: Gives credit to the first interaction that led the user to your brand. This model emphasizes the importance of the initial touchpoint but may overlook the influence of subsequent interactions.

  • Linear Attribution: Distributes credit evenly across all interactions leading to the conversion. This model provides a balanced view of the customer journey but may dilute the impact of particularly influential interactions.

  • Time-Decay Attribution: Assigns more credit to interactions closer to the time of conversion. This model acknowledges that recent interactions are often more influential in driving conversions.


By choosing the right attribution model, you can gain a clearer understanding of how your social media efforts are influencing customer behavior and driving conversions.


Implementing Conversion Tracking

To effectively track conversions, you’ll need to set up tracking pixels or tags on your website and integrate them with your social media platforms. Most social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, offer built-in tools for tracking conversions. These tools allow you to monitor user behavior after they engage with your social media content, providing valuable insights into the effectiveness of your campaigns.


Additionally, Google Analytics can help you track conversions across multiple channels and provide insights into how users move through your sales funnel. By using a combination of social media platform tools and Google Analytics, you can get a comprehensive view of your conversion data and make informed decisions about your social media strategy.


Calculating Customer Lifetime Value from Social Media

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is a critical metric for understanding the long-term value of your social media efforts. CLV represents the total revenue you can expect from a customer over the course of their relationship with your business. By calculating CLV, you can determine how much you can afford to spend on acquiring new customers through social media and which platforms are delivering the highest-value customers.


Steps to Calculate CLV

Here’s a step-by-step guide to calculating CLV:

  1. Determine Average Purchase Value: Start by calculating the average amount a customer spends per purchase. This can be done by dividing your total revenue by the number of purchases made within a specific time period.

  2. Calculate Purchase Frequency: Next, determine how often a customer makes a purchase over a given time period. This can be calculated by dividing the total number of purchases by the number of unique customers.

  3. Estimate Customer Lifespan: Estimate how long a customer continues to purchase from your business. This can be based on historical data or industry benchmarks.

  4. Calculate CLV: Finally, multiply the average purchase value by the purchase frequency and the customer lifespan.


For example, if your average purchase value is $100, your customers make a purchase every two months, and the average customer lifespan is three years, your CLV would be $100 x 6 (purchases per year) x 3 (years) = $1,800


Using CLV in Social Media Strategy

Once you have calculated CLV, you can use this metric to inform your social media strategy. For example, if you know that your CLV is $1,800, you can determine how much you can afford to spend on social media ads to acquire a new customer. This can help you make more informed decisions about your advertising budget and ensure that your spending is aligned with your business goals.


Additionally, by comparing CLV across different social media platforms, you can identify which platforms are delivering the highest-value customers and adjust your strategy accordingly. For example, if customers acquired through Facebook have a higher CLV than those acquired through Instagram, you might choose to allocate more of your budget to Facebook ads.


Advanced Analytics Tools for Social Media ROI Measurement

To measure the true ROI of your social media efforts, you need to go beyond the built-in analytics provided by social media platforms. While these tools are useful for tracking basic metrics, advanced analytics tools can provide deeper insights into how your social media strategy is impacting your business.


Internal Platform Analytics

Most social media platforms offer native analytics tools that allow you to track key metrics like engagement, reach, and conversions. Here’s a quick overview of some of the most commonly used platform analytics tools:


  • Facebook Insights: Provides detailed data on your page’s performance, including likes, reach, and post engagement. Facebook Insights also offers demographic information about your audience, helping you better understand who is engaging with your content.

  • Instagram Insights: Offers insights into your audience demographics, content performance, and follower growth. Instagram Insights also provides data on how your Stories are performing, which can be particularly useful for businesses that rely heavily on visual content.

  • Twitter Analytics: Tracks tweet impressions, engagement, and follower growth. Twitter Analytics also provides data on the effectiveness of your promoted tweets, helping you optimize your paid social strategy.


While these tools are valuable for tracking individual platform performance, they have limitations. They often don’t provide a complete view of how social media impacts your overall business goals or allow for cross-platform analysis. This is where third-party analytics tools come in.


Third-Party Analytics Software

While the platform's specific insights can be a starting point, as you grow, you will need more in-depth information. At Live Fearless Media, we rely on Metricool as our go-to tool for optimizing all of our clients' social media strategies across platforms. Metricool isn't just another analytics tool—it's an all-in-one solution that provides us with the insights we need to drive real results for our clients. By utilizing Metricool, we're able to track ROI and KPIs with precision, helping our clients see the big picture and make data-driven decisions that boost their business growth.


How Analytics Software Can Up Your ROI:

  • Multi-Platform Integration: Metricool allows you to track and manage social media performance across multiple platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and even Google Ads. This means you can see how all the pieces of your marketing strategies fit together and how each platform contributes to overall success.

  • Real-Time Analytics: Metricool provides real-time data on key metrics such as reach, impressions, engagement, and conversions. This allows your business to monitor the performance of social media campaigns as they happen and make adjustments on the fly if something isn’t working as expected.

  • ROI and KPI Tracking: One of the most powerful features of Metricool is its ability to track ROI and KPIs across all platforms. By analyzing data from each social media channel, you can determine which strategies are driving the most value for our clients. This includes tracking revenue generated, conversion rates, and customer acquisition costs. With this information, we can refine our clients' strategies to focus on the most effective tactics.


Ultimately, third party platforms like Metricool empower you to not just track the numbers but to translate those numbers into meaningful actions. It’s how we ensure that our client’s social media efforts are not only engaging their audience but also driving real business outcomes. And you can do it too!


Implementing a Data-Driven Social Media Strategy

Measuring the true ROI of your social media efforts requires a shift from focusing on vanity metrics to adopting a data-driven approach. By setting meaningful KPIs, tracking conversions, calculating customer lifetime value, and utilizing advanced analytics tools, you can gain a deeper understanding of how your social media strategy impacts your business goals.


Remember, social media is not just about building an online presence—it’s about driving real business outcomes. By taking a strategic approach to measuring ROI, you can ensure that your social media efforts contribute to long-term growth and success.


Implementing these advanced measurement techniques may require time and resources, but the insights you gain will be invaluable in optimizing your social media strategy and demonstrating the true value of your efforts to stakeholders. As you continue to refine your approach, you’ll be better equipped to make data-driven decisions that enhance your brand’s impact and drive meaningful results.


In the end, the goal is to move beyond superficial metrics and focus on what truly matters for your business. By applying the strategies outlined in this guide, you’ll be able to measure the real impact of your social media efforts, optimize your strategy, and drive meaningful growth for your business. Whether you’re a small business owner or a marketing professional, these insights will help you maximize the value of your social media investment and achieve your business goals.



*Please Be Aware that Live Fearless Media and Lauren Hatch are affiliates of Metricool. If you purchase for one of our links we will receive a small commission.

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