Jacquelyn German — December 12, 2016 
If you think you don’t need to show the value of your social campaigns, think again. To secure your desired budget for the strategies you wish to implement, you need to be able to prove your social media ROI – return on investment.
Ok – now what exactly is social media ROI?
To put it simply, social media ROI is a measure of the effectiveness of a social media campaign. If you subtract your investment from your return and divide it by your investment percent, you can manually calculate your ROI!
Another way to consider ROI is to compare the ratio between costs and gains. A few examples of costs would be labor, training and technology. Gains could come specifically from your analytics – things like clicks, purchases and page views.
And why is measuring ROI so important?
Proving your worth as a social media manager has always been difficult. Convincing clients that they should have a social presence? Not the easiest task. Convincing them that you’ve invested their social budget wisely and can prove it? Even harder.
But if you want your efforts to be taken seriously, it’s crucial to be able to prove it’s worth it. Showcasing how you’ve allocated resources to different strategies and campaigns is important, and demonstrating actual results from these campaigns could even help to increase your overall budget.
How can I set goals to prove my ROI?
Here’s the easy part! No matter what are you trying to accomplish with your social campaign, there’s always a way to track your results. Whether you use the metrics within Facebook Ads Manager or the reporting tools from a program like Hootsuite or Sprout, you’ll be able to share that data with your clients to demonstrate your success.
Goal Examples: Leads, Clicks, Reach, Conversions, Engagement, Impressions
How do I report on my ROI?
Set up a monthly meeting with your client to present your data. In preparation, pull together all of your analytics and set up a report taking your client through each different campaign. For example, each slide should contain screenshots of the actual ad, the targeting you used to run the campaign and the metrics you were measuring.
Facebook Ads Manager shows you the results of your desired outcome (engagements, conversions, etc.) and also allows you to see the cost per action – the exact dollar amount tied to each goal you achieved. You can use a helpful guide like this to compare your results to industry standards!
To sum it all up – understanding your social media ROI really just boils down to demonstrating the results of your social strategy. If your campaigns have performed well, you’ll be able to share those results with your client and prove that your budget is improving their overall business model.
Kickstart Step: A great way to show ROI is to send leads directly to your client – businesses love collecting potential customers! Check out our blog on how to run a Lead Generation ad on Facebook – and don’t forget to measure your goals along the way!
Just getting started on social? Download our free 15 Steps to Social Success Checklist before you begin!
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