Every type of investment you make in your business must yield a return, otherwise it is a financial loss. Even social media efforts represent an investment, both of time and money. It is an investment into something more than direct sales. It is an investment into your customers’ lifetime values, into your brand value and business goodwill.
For this reason you invest your time, skill and a part of your company budget into the whole array of social media marketing activities which you know that will bring you the expected result. But how do you measure if you actually reach these results? Without a proper calculation of the revenues versus the investment, you will never be able to state if your business is truly profitable and if the customer acquisition efforts actually pay off.
In order to give you a helpful hand, we have looked around and analysed various social media tools which offer you a clear view of your results for each ad campaign and post sharing schedule. After comparing the features and benefits they offer, we made our final selection. Here it is:
1. Kissmetrics
This is one of the most useful tools for measuring the ROI of your social media ad campaigns. This is a critical aspect of your social media ROI, because we are talking about actual money which you spent on these ads. Kissmetrics gives you detailed and accurate answers to your questions regarding the actual revenues from each campaign on various social media platforms such as Facebook™, Twitter and LinkedIn, but also from various websites where you post your banner ads.
Thus, you can analyse and compare the results of various campaigns run on various social media platforms, calculate your customer lifetime value and improve your overall spending on social media ads. Kissmetrics is free to use for a trial period of 30 days. If you decide to continue using it, the monthly subscription is $120.
2. RJ Metrics Cloud BI
Cloud BI is your all-in-one tool for the most accurate calculation of customer lifetime value based on the social media platforms on which you advertised to attract customers. Cloud BI is also extremely useful if you want to identify the social media platform which yields the highest overall ROI for your company, thus helping you refine your investments in social media ads.
This tool can be set up to send you regular reports (usually 30-day customer lifetime value calculations) directly to your email, so that you are constantly informed on how well your social media efforts pay off.
3. Klout
This free tool will not give you information on the monetary aspect of social media ROI. Rather, it shows you how your brand image is perceived by users on Facebook™, Twitter, Google+, Instagram and other social media platforms. In essence, Klout calculates a score based on how many times your posts are liked, shared, retweeted or get comments. Thus you can always assess how effective your social media activity is and how many people you can potentially reach and influence. Based on your Klout Score you can adjust your posting schedule, identify the social media network where your brand is more popular and identify the types of posts which are most likely to go viral.
4. Cyfe
Cyfe is the watching eye which knows exactly how many times, how, when and where your content is shared across all social media platforms and – what is more important – how these shares contribute to your overall ROI.
Besides the traditional social media platforms, Cyfe allows you to add Google Analytics data and Shopify to the monitoring schedule. The many customisations and widgets available within the Cyfe interface allow you to focus on a specific social media platform or marketing activity (hashtags, social media mentions, ad campaigns, traffic generating posts). The monthly subscription for Cyfe is $19, or $14 if you opt for an annual subscription.