TOOLS TO MEASURE SOCIAL MEDIA ROI IN 2011 AND THE ROI PYRAMID

In his latest blog post on Web Strategist, Altimeter Group researcher Jeremiah Owyang prescribes The ROI Pyramid as a marketer’s solution for tracking success in 2011. With precision and simplicity, the Pyramid defines what metrics each job title should report to which stakeholders.

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We all know that tracking social media success is important, and this chart helpfully breaks down exactly what measurements each person in a social business should be taking. What tools do you use to take those measurements? Here is a sample, from the “bottom>>up” of the pyramid.

Community Managers & Agencies

Should measure: Engagement Data – Clicks, fans, followers, retweets and checkins

Try: Tweetreach

Tweetreach delivers highly detailed reports on your Twitter activity. It shows your overall exposure, the types of Tweets (Tweets, @replies, retweets) and impressions (the number of times people saw Tweets about that topic.) What I really like is that they surface reporting on not just your @name, but on your topic. So when people are mentioning your brand or linking to your website via Twitter, you see who the top contributors are and what they are Tweeting.

Tweetreach offers free tracking for the first 50 Tweets. They have a variety of pricing plans ranging from $84.00/month to $899.00/month.

Business Stakeholders

Should Measure: Social Media Analytics – Share of Voice, Resonation, Word of Mouth

Try: Viralheat

Viralheat is a social media analytics tool. It offers sentiment analysis to identify the mood of every mention. It digs into influencer analytics to surface your strongest voices in the social web. Its viral analytics monitors mentions and shows which conversations are going viral.

Viralheat comes with a free seven-day trial and a choice of three plans – all of which are highly affordable, the most expensive running just $89/month.

Business Executives

Should measure: Business Metrics – Revenue, Reputation, CSAT

Try: Argyle Social

Argyle Social is a SaaS social media marketing platform that helps marketers measure and optimize their efforts. What makes Argyle Social unique from other social media marketing platforms is that it doesn’t focus on clicks or sentiment, rather, it focuses on conversions. By setting up goals in Argyle Social, you can decide what conversions you want to achieve through your social media marketing (email signups, ebook downloads, event registrations, sales) and tie those to your Twitter or Facebook campaigns in Argyle Social. Argyle allows you to embed a piece of code in your website to do the tracking.

Here is how you set up goals in Argyle Social:

Argyle Social offers three pricing plans: $149/month, $299/month and $499/month.

For a quick reference, all of these tools are in my ROI Pyramid Toolkit on oneforty.

Obviously, these aren’t the only choices out there that’ll help you manage, execute and measure social business programs at your organization next year. Is there something we’re missing? Add it to oneforty (the more the merrier!) Also, don’t miss our Business & Marketing category for more solutions for your business.

COMMENTARY:   Excellent advice from a social media expert.  

One of my favorite articles on the subject of measuring financial returns from social media is by Content Marketing Institute titled, "How to Calculate the ROI from Social Media," by Tom Pisello, "The ROI Guy".  Tom has an outstanding reputation for helping business executives calculate their ROIs in a broad range of industries not just media.  He has written numerous articles on the subject of calculating ROI, and I am happy to show you how he does it.

Tom calculates the ROI of social media by comparing investments versus outcomes using the Social Media Value Chain.

In order to measure the financial ROI from social media you need to understand and track four key measurement components:   

• Investments - Social media requires an investment in these areas:
  • Marketing labor.
  • Resources and tools to establish the social media presence.
  • Content and campaign creation.
  • Campaign monitoring.
  • Social media collaboration and measurement.
• Engagement  - Measure engagement by keeping tabs on the number of followers and advocates you have reached from your social media marketing efforts.
• Benefits  - Measure the impact social media marketing has on the bottom line.  Consider things such as:
  • Generating incremental revenue with new prospects and existing customers
  • Driving product / operational savings and innovation with collaborative partners
  • Avoiding costs for other less effective, less efficient or redundant lead-generation  programs.
• Derived Value and ROI  - Compare the ratio of investments versus derived benefits to assure the social media efforts are generating enough value compared to other potential investments.

The Social Media Value chain as a model to determine costs and benefits, so that marketers will be able to calculate the financial ROI from social media.

Measuring the financial ROI of social media requires considerable discipline, strategies, procedures and a dedicated management system to track and capture the required cost and benefit information.    

I like Tom's approach the most, because it is very simple to understand, even by a layman.  If you have a financial background like I do, so much the better.  Hope you find this valuable.  

I would like to extend my thanks to Altimeter Group researcher Jeremiah Owyang, Laura Fitton @Pistachio and founder of OneForty.com and Tom Pisello, "The ROI Guy". 

 Hope all of the above helps.

Courtesy of an article dated December 14, 2010 appearing in OneForty.com

Comments

[SEO Company]

till now i never put my hand on any of these tools and truly am never able to track roi from social media and this is biggest issue i am facing these days..Let i will use this tool for social media and see how it will help in measuring roi from other tools

[white label seo]

Thank you very much for the twitter metric measurement softwares that you have provided. This will help me manage my account.