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Blogging continues to deliver a greater ROI than social media. Our website traffic is roughly 40,000 unique website visitors (at time of writing, 2 years into content marketing) whereas social media accounts for less than 500 website visits per month. If you want to attract more “ready to buy” type people, then go where the fish are, typically thats Google.
In 2022, more than 50% of marketers are planning to increase their investment in social media marketing, highlighting just how valuable it is for businesses.
There are many business benefits to social media, from increased exposure and web traffic to lead generation.
Social media is great for testing your market, building connections, launching campaigns, and advertising.
And social media marketing is very time-consuming and often delivers a minimal ROI.
On the other hand, blogging is great for attracting organic traffic, keeping people on your site longer, and building a mailing list.
And a blogging strategy requires time to create the articles and patience while your content builds an audience.
Both offer exciting results and require an investment. This article will help you decide which is best for you.
What Is Social Media ROI?
ROI is a term commonly used in business and finance and refers to return on investment.
Your social media ROI looks explicitly at the return on investment generated by your social media efforts.
Your social ROI looks at whether you are receiving enough value to justify your costs.
It’s usually calculated in dollars and cents, but the returns and costs of social media are not always expressed as a clear monetary value.
Set Goals And Objectives
Setting goals is an important part of any marketing campaign.
Without setting clear goals early on in your campaign, you’re setting yourself up for a frustrating cycle of wondering how your efforts are working and what they are doing for you.
While goal setting isn’t challenging, it needs to be practical. But before you start, be sure to select the right social channels to attract potential customers for your business.
Can You Measure The ROI of Your Social Media Marketing Without These Goals?
Theoretically, you could, but real social ROI is only achieved when you show how social returns connect to the bigger picture.
Think about various ways your social media investment might create value.
Research Your Target Audience
First and foremost, you must understand your audience before creating any social media campaign.
If you don’t do your research, you risk spending time, money, and resources on the wrong channels — and missing out on more profitable connections elsewhere.
Optimize For Your Target Audience
Once you have your social media management tools set up, use them to understand what content works for your core audience and what doesn’t.
If your brand is new to social media, you might have to test multiple campaigns or content forms to understand your audience.
LinkedIn's Rising Popularity
With over 750 million professionals worldwide using its platform every single month, there isn’t much doubt why so many businesses are flocking away from other platforms such as Twitter or Facebook due entirely to them.
One of the best applications for LinkedIn is its sponsored content options.
Businesses can engage with potential customers by sharing valuable industry content on their newsfeeds.
Every post has a call-to-action and allows you to include text such as CTA buttons, links, images, or videos, so don’t miss out on this opportunity.
Ninety-one percent of marketing executives consider LinkedIn the best place to find quality content.
Calculate How Much You Spend On Social Media Marketing
Your social media costs might include:
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The cost of tools and platforms for managing social
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The budget allocated to social ads spends
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Content creation: In-house and external content creation costs, including working with creators and/or freelancers
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The ongoing costs for your social media team (salaries, training, etc.)
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Hiring employees (writers, graphic designers, etc.)
Advertising Costs
Are you running Facebook and Instagram ads? How much did they cost per day? How about per campaign?
Once you have a numerical cost associated with each area above, you’re ready to calculate your return on investment.
Integrating E-commerce With Social Media
When it comes to social media marketing, you’re bound to run into skeptics who view social media as a waste of time.
Therefore, measuring results to improve your marketing campaigns is one of the most significant benefits of online marketing.
Unfortunately, many find determining a quantitative return on investment (ROI) for your social media marketing efforts is easier said than done.
To get the best ROI and increase sales, you should allow users to purchase products or services on social media platforms.
This is best achieved by integrating your e-commerce platform with social networks. This way, users can purchase products without ever leaving their favorite apps.
Join A Social Media Group
Some examples of communities include Facebook groups, Pinterest boards, subreddits, and hashtags on social media. Not every one of those channels will work for your industry.
Facebook works in many industries, but finding engaging groups can be difficult.
Pinterest tends to work better for B2C blogs, but we have also seen some B2B blogs crush it, especially in real estate and making online money niches.
Create Content That Sells
One of the best ways to reach new customers is to provide value to existing customers.
Your existing customers are a great place to strum up content ideas, promotions, and educational content that will resonate with potential customers.
Unlike sales pitches, which can be easily measured, the amount of sales indirectly produced from educational and helpful content isn’t easy to measure.
Sprout Social reports that 60% of consumers want posts with information about new products or services, 59% want educational content, and 56% want posts that entertain.
As far as content type on social media, Sprout Social reports that 30% of consumers want links to more information, 18% want graphics/images, 17% want produced video, and 11% want text/conversations.
Marketers need to understand what their prospects and current customers want from their brand on social media, where they are in the sales funnel, and the types of content – videos, info graphs, etc. – they prefer.
The only way to do this is by asking (surveys and polls), analyzing social media data, and continually fine-tuning social media posts.
Click here to learn more on content marketing (Keyword research, etc.).
Getting Traffic
Every blog starts as an unknown island in a big sea of traffic and gets zero traffic. And then the traffic builds.
Your email announcements of each blog post bring in traffic, and those readers share your posts.
Search engines index your content and start sending organic, new traffic to your content, and those readers share your posts. And traffic builds.
The beauty of blog content is that it’s evergreen.
UTM Parameters
Add these short text codes to the URLs you share on social media to track important data about website visitors and traffic sources.
Combined with analytics programs, UTM parameters give you a detailed picture of your social media success, from a high level (which networks are performing best) down to the granular details (which post drove the most traffic to a specific page).
You can add UTM parameters to your links manually or use link settings in Hootsuite.
Incorporate Videos
You know how people love videos, right? The only thing we’re better at than watching them is making our own.
Most brands rely on images when advertising their products or services – but that’s a mistake because just one good-quality video can attract more traffic to your brand page and drive up sales in the long run.
Facebook's Advertising Tools
Facebook has been the subject of much controversy in recent years, but it remains one of Earth’s most popular social media sites, with 2.85 billion monthly active users in 2021.
One of the major benefits of Facebook’s advertising tools is their ability to target specific demographics and set up conversion tracking.
You can target your ads towards certain audiences depending on interests, demographics, behaviors, or even connect to your business — like whether they’ve attended one of your events or have friends who’ve liked your business page.
These targeting capabilities can help your business reach users who are most likely to purchase your product or service.
Facebook has over 70 different ad types, making the possibilities for marketing campaigns incredibly diverse.
Almost 69% of marketers say video ads outperform image and plain text ads on Facebook.
Eighty-one percent of Facebook users only access the platform via mobile devices, so using the vertical video format allows you to get more visibility and increase the chances of getting more clicks.
Facebook video ads can increase the CTR by 2-3x.
Re-using Content Across Channels
Most social teams create content in silos. Perhaps they tell one message via an Instagram post and then create entirely different materials for a YouTube video or Tweet.
This undoubtedly requires a lot of time, effort, and resources — which can become frustrating when you don’t see the ROI you need from these channels.
When you focus on creating engaging content that can be used in multiple ways across channels, you’ll see improved ROI and ROE (return on effort) across your campaigns — including your social activation.
To repurpose your content across channels, perhaps you post snippets of a full YouTube video on Facebook or Instagram.
What Is Social Listening?
Social listening is an important way to understand what’s happening in your market. For example, look at the changing perceived value of various platforms within the last year.
Facebook and Instagram saw drops in effectiveness for achieving business goals, while TikTok, Snapchat, and Pinterest all saw impressive gains.
Instagram's Business Capabilities
The platform has proven a viable strategy for businesses.
Ninety percent of users follow a business on Instagram, and 50% of users are more interested in a brand after seeing ads for it on Instagram.
So why doesn’t it surpass Facebook for generating ROI?
Most likely, Instagram falls short of producing strong ROI due to its more intangible metrics — such as brand awareness, reputation, loyalty, and consumer engagement.
For instance, an Instagram user might never click on one of your business’ ads directly from the platform.
Tweet, Tweet
Whether you’re Marvel promoting the next Avengers movie or Daquan spreading the next great meme, your Twitter network is key because so much of your reach on Twitter comes from engaging with and sharing other users’ content.
Creating content specifically to grab the attention of your Twitter followers can help you grow your network and build your reputation in the process.
Google Analytics
This free analytics tool from Google is a must for tracking website traffic, conversions, and sign-ups from social media campaigns.
It allows you to go beyond one-off actions and track the value of your social campaigns over time by creating and tracking a conversion funnel.
Google Analytics is crucial for calculating your ROI. Thanks to its ability to track UTM tags, you can monitor traffic directly from your campaigns and illustrate cause and effect relationships.
For example, if you want to see how much traffic from your link in your bio it’s going to a specific landing page, you’d use a UTM tag.
Top Social Media Platforms Used By B2C Marketers In 2022
The holy trio includes:
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Facebook
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Instagram
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Twitter
Of course, you can use many other platforms to find new customers, such as TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube, or Pinterest. The sky’s the limit.
Over 40% of marketers cited Facebook as the most effective channel for their businesses, followed by the roughly 30% who saw the highest ROI from Instagram, another Facebook-owned social platform.
By comparison, the other social channels in the list — including LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, and Snapchat — all ranked much lower, with less than 10% citing each platform as the best channel for ROI.
It is often not about what is possible but what you can manage. Some companies can’t afford to train all their staff on Twitter and G+ behavior and best practices.
You don’t need to be everywhere, but you should take the time to research as many social media networks as you can to see how well they perform in your industry.
Not all social networks are created equal. Many newcomers don’t realize that not all social networks work the same for your business type.
Various social media tactics can be applied differently to each platform, meaning they’ll produce different outcomes.
So your goals need to be determined upfront to ensure they’re aligned with your social strategy.
Which Social Media Platform Offers The Highest ROI?
Facebook (now Meta) is the social media channel that provides marketers with a high return on investment.
According to HubSpot’s 2021 State of Marketing report, 40% of businesses say they’ve seen an increase in sales because Facebook was their most effective platform – and 30% specifically cited Instagram as well.
Why You Should Use Paid Social Media Differently
There is a certain logic to utilizing paid social media differently.
Suppose you include boosted posts, PPC ads, or other paid advertising as part of your social media strategy (and you probably should be).
In that case, these costs also need to be factored into your overall investment cost to calculate your ROI.
A high ROI activity like lead generation can easily justify the investment paid social entails.
It may be harder to convince the bean counters of the need for paid investment in customer engagement or brand awareness, which are much more abstract and tricky to measure.
However, it is worth remembering that all social media activity is ‘paid,’ as you’re paying someone.
Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is a hot topic that is misunderstood. At its core, influencer marketing is about building relationships. The right people will open up many opportunities.
But the marketer needs to be clear on what your goals are when working with influencers. Some influencers are well-known on social media platforms, which can help drive traffic.
What Is HubSpot?
HubSpot is a cross-platform dashboard for managing paid and organic social campaigns together so that you can analyze and report on the ROI of ads and organic content in one place.
Seeing performance for organic and paid content together allows you to build a unified social strategy that maximizes your ad spend and in-house resources to improve social ROI quickly.
Social media ROI has been a somewhat elusive concept in the past, but that’s changing fast.
Eighty-three percent of the Hootsuite 2022 Social Trends survey respondents said they are confident in quantifying social ROI. That’s a big jump from 68% last year.
Understanding and effectively communicating social ROI can also help you grow your social budget and expand your strategy.
After all, it’s easier to justify spending money on strategies that provide more value than they cost.
As long as your ROI is more than 0, your investments make your business money.
A negative ROI means that your investment was greater than the value it generated (a.k.a. you lost money).
Measuring social media ROI matters because it’s critical to building and refining your social marketing strategy.
Measure Social Media ROI
A report by Social Media Examiner found that only 10% of respondents strongly agree that they can measure ROI on social media, and 56% are either uncertain or disagree entirely with the assertion.
DMA shows that only 48% of marketers agree that social media gives them any return on investment.
A report from the DMA on social media’s place in marketing reveals some exciting trends, but not all of them are positive.
Although the vast majority (77%) of marketers use at least one social network to promote their brand, that doesn’t necessarily mean they are getting the most out of social or generating significant ROI.
Use Social Data For Social Media Channels
The wealth of insights into your customers that social media provides is not utilized but only when crafting social campaigns.
This is a big mistake. The data can also be significant for other campaigns like targeted emails or on-site messaging.
Only a tiny handful of marketers constantly use social data to tailor messaging and generate relevant content.
This is a waste of a major opportunity, as customers are far more likely to respond to messages tailored to them or their customer segment, so data gathered from social can significantly increase lead gen and revenue from the main website, thus boosting social’s overall ROI.
Hootsuite Impact
Hootsuite Impact provides social media marketing ROI measurement across paid, owned, and earned social channels.
Impact connects to your existing analytics systems so you can integrate social data with the rest of your business metrics.
It makes producing reports easy and delivers plain-language recommendations to optimize your social strategy (improving social ROI).
Remember The Bigger Picture
Don’t chase short-term ROI to the point that you lose sight of what makes your brand valuable and unique.
Jumping on a trend to get likes and comments don’t provide value if it annoys your audience or muddies your brand voice. It can even damage your brand in the long term.
Don’t forget that the big picture of social media ROI includes returns beyond the marketing department.
Once you have your social media management tools set up, use them to understand what content works for your core audience and what doesn’t.
If your brand is new to social media, you might have to test multiple campaigns or content forms to understand your audience.
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Are your Instagram influencer marketing campaigns bringing in significant traffic?
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Or are your YouTube videos driving more newsletter sign-ups?
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What time of day are users interacting with your posts?
Understanding where your audience is and what they need is key to increasing your social ROI.
Hop-On The Kennected Train
Want a solid lead generation plan? Kennected offers a series of solutions focused on building relationships with key decision-makers to achieve this feat.
Kennected used this process to earn the Two Comma Club Award (for earning $1,000,000) in less than seven months and a spot on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing companies in America.
Moreover, we helped over 17,000 customers fill their sales pipelines with qualified leads and increase revenue.
Our LinkedIn lead generation services can help you take your LinkedIn marketing to the next level.
For more information on how to use this LinkedIn Sales Funnel and Kennected to fill your sales pipeline with qualified leads in less than 10 minutes per day, schedule a free strategy session here.
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