A simple question, most people who are thinking of using social media as part of their campaign often ask.
But how do you actually know you are getting a good ROI for your social media campaign?
There are three ways to measure this:
1. Traffic
Before you begin the social media campaign, make sure you record the number of visits to your site. If you have Google Analytics, you can export the traffic to your site and the key terms driving the most volume. You will see an increase in the amount of traffic during and after the social media campaign has finished.
2. Rankings
Measure your rankings weekly during the campaign. You should notice an improvement in the rankings as people are talking more about your site and your product.
3. Links
With an increase in the amount of buzz from the campaign, you should also see more links to your site. Make sure you record the number of inbound links before the campaign starts, this you can do by logging into your Google Webmaster tools.
You can easily measure the effects of social media if you are just working on that area of digital. It gets more difficult to relate the change in traffic, rankings and links when you are also running paid search, affiliates and off line advertising campaigns. However, you should consider social media as part of your integrated search and seo campaign. It is a growing area of digital and the effects it can have in terms of traffic and buzz to your site and around your brand can be phenomenal.