I’ll be the first to admit, I’m awful at math. But throughout my 19 years of education and now in my career, math has unfortunately proven useful. And while I admit I based my unorthodox career choices on how far away I could get from simple arithmetic, I find myself using it almost daily. However, this blog post isn’t a PSA for the importance of girls and math, although I wish they had more of those when I was growing up; it is a message on the importance of social media ROI.

According to Fast Company, 88% of 750 surveyed marketing professionals didn’t feel they could accurately measure the effectiveness of their social media campaigns, and 52% said that dealing with social media ROI was their biggest frustration.

Despite what anyone says, social media can be measured. Social media marketing is effective. Social media does indeed have a return on investment.

As anyone who works in an office or cube and still has a pulse knows, the ultimate goal of any business is improving profitability and, therefore, all money spent on growing the business must do just that, including social media.

Social media ROI can be measured. Now, I know you are thinking, “Great! Hand over the formula!” Unfortunately, it’s not that easy.

First, you have to define a few things before you can measure the effectiveness of your social media efforts:

• How does social media fit within your business strategy? Sometimes it is a supporting component and other times it takes main stage, but either way, you should know the measurable objectives of social media for your overarching business goals before you start.
• Have a clear annual marketing strategy that includes social media objectives and tactics, that integrate seamlessly with the rest of your marketing campaign(s.)
• Define social jargon as it relates to your business goals/objectives. For instance, if maintaining the quality of a customer service program is one of the main goals of your business, the social media component of the customer service program must not be overlooked, but measured similarly to the way you would measure customer phone call and email success. Or, if increasing sales is your goal, find the metrics that enable you to track this from social media. Information from an Adobe white paper suggests looking at the first click attribution and thinking about a customer’s progress in the purchasing cycle in order to put a value to your social media channels.

Of course, this is just the beginning of measuring your social media successes. As social media continues to develop and evolve, so will new ways to measure and analyze. This includes help from third-party analytics tools. Oftentimes people are so anxious to begin their social media efforts that they forget to do the most important work of all – determine the way to tell that the fruits of your social media labor are paying off.

Best of luck!