Social media ROI is a metric showing how much value you generated with your Social Media Marketing investments. It is usually a sum of money, but some companies view ROI as a non-monetary value such as comments or newsletter signups. However, the measures of social media ROI for businesses depend entirely on their objectives. As a realtor, here are ways to quantify the ROI of social media marketing efforts;
TRACK THE ‘BEFORE’ & ‘AFTER’ DATA Social Media Marketing
The formula to calculate Social Media ROI is: Profit / Investment x 100 = social media ROI %
Profit – the money you’ve earned from your social media marketing efforts.
Investment – the total cost of your social media marketing efforts.
However, social media ROI is loaded with the assumptions that the total month-over-month sales growth is directly attributable to the marketing campaign. For the marketing ROI to have any real meaning, it is vital to have comparisons. Monthly comparisons – particularly the sales in the months prior to the campaign launching – can help show the impact more clearly. Gather data from analytics software like Google, Facebook ‘before’ you run the campaign over a period of 6 months or more. Then measure the responses ‘after’ the campaign using the same metrics to determine the ‘growth’ or ‘losses’. For instance, by measuring responses to certain display campaigns, it can help you create more effective Paid Per Click ads. Likewise, measuring how social media engages with your content can help you decide what type of content appeals to different market segments for future campaigns.
GROWTH IN FOLLOWERS
A “swell” in the numbers of your followers on social media platforms is a sign that shows your audience is increasingly becoming aware of your brand and engaging with the products and services you offer. For example, a realtor business’ Facebook page may get an increase in followers from 1000 to 5000 likes, signifying its marketing efforts are paying off.
TRAFFIC TO PLATFORMS
Most social media platforms have built-in tracking tools that show how much realtor businesses have earned from their ads and how much traffic their websites have. Instagram business accounts, for instance, show how many people visit their websites get per week. Realtors should monitor the number of visits and engagement, using tools such as Google Analytics to determine if the incoming traffic is increasing.
GROWING ENGAGEMENT
Not all the metrics of measuring the ROI are monetary. 58% of realtors measure their ROI based on engagement in likes and share and comments. For the realtor’s business, these indicators go a long way to show that the business is credible and that it’s social media marketing strategies are bearing fruits. The realtor should therefore put up more posts that require feedback and is valuable enough to share with the target market.
INCREASE IN LEADS AND CONVERSIONS Through Social Media Marketing
An increase in leads signifies more potential business opportunities for a realtor business. One way to measure leads is to drive unique visitors to your website and directly to a landing page which requests for their contact information. Using the numbers of emails collected, a realtor should be able to determine the results of the campaign. For example, if 10 percent of the people who come to your site to fill out a contact form, and 2 percent of those become clients. This means, that of the 1,200 new visitors to your site that have come from social media, you can expect 2.4 of them to become clients.
INCREASE IN SIGN-UPS AND NEWSLETTERS SUBSCRIPTIONS
Social media ROI can also be measured by the number of subscribers to a newsletter. These are people that want to interact more with the business such as see future house listings in that location. With the emails collected, the realtors have direct access to these prospects and should direct them to the website, get them to sign up for virtual or physical open houses and more. Unlike social networks, everyone has an email address and at least 80% check it daily. Emails typically outperform social networks on call to actions by 4X. Realtors should therefore focus their social media campaigns to get followers to subscribe to their newsletters.
For realtor businesses to reap a good return on investments from social media, the Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) need to be well defined. Is the business looking to grow sales or increase awareness? These two objectives, make the ROI easier to measure using financial and non-monetary metrics. They will give the realtor important insight of whether they are on track with their goals or treading on dangerous ground!
