Wyoming Business Tips for March 19

A weekly look at Wyoming business questions from the Wyoming Small Business Development Center (WSBDC), part of WyomingEntrepreneur.Biz, a collection of business assistance programs at the University of Wyoming.

By Nicholas Giraldo, WSBDC market researcher

“How do I measure return on investment (ROI) on social media?” Joe, Laramie

I have put together some common ways to measure social media ROI in a way that is easy to understand and implement. All it takes is knowing the tools available that can help track activity and the key metrics that can help evaluate marketing efforts.

Before beginning, it is helpful to know how to measure the costs of marketing efforts as they apply to your bottom line. These are specific to each business. Know your goals, outline a marketing budget, and know how to measure the costs of marketing and selling your product and service.

Here are some common available tools to measure the effectiveness through your website and social media pages:

-- Website analytics. Services such as Google Analytics can help you better understand customer behavior on the website. It can answer questions such as what pages visitors visit; how many visitors leave versus how many stay; what words visitors use to arrive on the site; and what social media sites visitors come from.

Understanding these metrics will help track and measure your marketing efforts more accurately and quickly.

-- Custom weblinks. Services such as www.bitly.com can create custom links that also provide traffic metrics, showing how many people clicked on the link and when they clicked on it. This is helpful for measuring traffic to the website during specific ad campaigns or measuring traffic from specific social media campaigns.

For instance, creating a custom link for your Facebook page will show exactly how visitors saw the link on their Facebook feed.

-- Social media analytics. Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter provide businesses with metrics that track all sorts of activities and engagement, such as shares, likes, retweets, comments and views. The social platforms also provide audience information such as online behavior -- when customers are online -- demographics and interests.

All these metrics are helpful in developing more targeted campaigns and evaluating the effectiveness of social marketing efforts.

Another key metric is tracking your team members’ marketing efforts. Keeping track of how much time they are spending online and what they are doing online will help to better calculate return on investment, whether it be time, money or both.

Understanding your business goals, marketing budget, analytic tools and individual or group marketing activities will help better calculate the ROI of personal digital marketing efforts.

A blog version of this article and an opportunity to post comments are available at www.wyomingsbdc.org/blog1/.

The WSBDC is a partnership of the U.S. Small Business Administration, the Wyoming Business Council and the University of Wyoming. To ask a question, call 1-800-348-5194, email wsbdc@uwyo.edu, or write 1000 E. University Ave., Dept. 3922, Laramie, WY, 82071-3922.