3. The goal is value
More value = More investment
Information, Recognition, Networking
4. Information = workshops, magazines,
newsletters, etc
Members are living in the Age of Information
Social media is quick, easy way to provide
quality info, and, therefore value to members
5. Recognition is a big part of prestige
Social media is great at highlighting member
accomplishments
Ie. Blog about long-time member, YouTube
video on award winner, “Wall of Fame” on
Pinterest
6. SM makes networking quick, easy, accessible
Social media gives you opportunity to
facilitate connections
Association can make it quicker, easier, more
accessible
This equals more value in eyes of members
7. SM gives chance to highlight other areas of
value
Ie. Infographic about money saved as
member. A ‘timeline’ blog post of lobby
efforts. Corresponding tweets, FB posts
SM can educate members about value of
association
8.
9.
10.
11. What is ROI?
Calculating social media ROI is like giving
someone flowers.
There’s no magic formula
12.
13. Kevin is the communications manager at the
Canadian Association of Donut Makers
He’s running the CADM’s social media for two
years.
Twitter, Facebook and Blog.
14. No idea about social media ROI
Budget cuts threaten social media program
Needs to justify his job
Panic has set in
15. Another way to define return is goals
Format overall association goals into social
media goals
Kevin’s goals: Events, advocacy, young
professionals
Know your goals to know your success
16. How effective and efficient is each dollar,
each hour or each tweet
Kevin’s Input:
◦ $48,000 salary (100% of time)
◦ 25% spent on social media
◦ Therefore $12,000 spent on SM ($4,000/platform)
◦ Ex. Young pro tweets make up 15% of total tweets,
therefore equals a $600 investment.
17. Become good friends with data
78 tweets with young pro content
Total spend / total tweets x relevant tweets =
Input
$4,000 / 520 x 78 = $600
18. Total Interactions, URL Clicks, Year-Over-
Year Engagement, Key Influencers
Interactions = retweets, favourites, mentions,
clicks = value
URL Clicks = traffic
23. Money spent/URL Clicks received = cost-per-
click
$169.23/92 clicks = $1.84
For every $1.84, one person went to the
website.
Website is go-to resource for YPs, which =
value
24. Interactions/Impressions x 100 =
Engagement Rate
210 interactions/8,750 impressions x 100 =
2.4% engagement rate
2.4% (2014) vs. 2.02% (2013)
More efficient, more effective use of money
25. Cost-per-key-influencer
Determine who key influencers are
Count them (Kevin has 172 in last year)
$4,000/172 = $23.26 per key influencer
$23.26 (2014) vs. $34.78 (2013)
26. Only been in government relations for 3 years
Met with government officials 3 times in
2014
Goal is to bring awareness to advocacy and
engage members in calls to action
40 posts (25% of total content, $1,000 spent)
28. Interactions = likes, shares, comments, clicks
$1,000 spent / 310 interactions = $3.23
cost-per-interaction
$3.23 CPI (2014) vs. $4.02 CPI (2013)
More value for equal money = Better ROI
29. A like is “least you can do” scenario, a click
means more engagement
75 clicks on 10 links
10 links = 10 posts = ¼ of total posts =
$250
$250 / 75 clicks = $3.33 cost-per-click
30. Reach = 24,000 ($0.041 per person reached)
$0.041 (2014 reach) vs. $0.053 (2013 reach)
Better ROI than direct mail, email.
Every cent counts
31. 24,000 impressions, 310 interactions
310 / 24,000 x 100 = 1.29%
1.29% of people saw the post and engaged
with it
1.29% (2014 rate) vs. 1.33% (2013 rate)
Look at consistency, overall reach for ROI
32. 7 out 25 CADM blog posts were event-
focused
SM Goal = increase awareness, drive traffic
$4,000 spent on blogging
$4K / 25 posts X 7 event posts = $1,120
investment
33. Definitely use Google Analytics
Sessions
Session Duration
Landing Pages & User Flow
34. Number of times a page was visited (not
unique visits)
644 sessions for 7 conference posts
$1,120 (money spent) / 644 (sessions) =
$1.74 (cost-per-session)
$1.74 for each visit to the conference blogs
35. Session Duration = how long people stay on
your posts
Longer Duration = more value, higher ROI
346 seconds (avg. duration) x 644 (total
sessions) = 3,713 minutes
$0.30 = cost-per-minute
36. Landing Page = The page that website
visitors entered through
User Flow shows flow of traffic from landing
pages to other pages
Examining both metrics is key to determining
a page’s effect on another area of your site
37.
38. Determine date parameters
400 landed on blog, 110 went directly to
registration page
205 others visited the blog, 43 went directly to
registration page
Total flow-through rate from blog = 25.3%
Flow-through rate to registration page from
other pages = 14.2%
39. Calculating ROI is only ¾ of the battle
Reports give direction of goals, resources,
effort
At least quarterly, at most weekly
41. Analyze new followers (quality over quantity)
Cost-per-key-influencer
Final Analysis (summarise data, ROI, goals,
plans)
Add glossary
42. Kevin’s Goal: A Twitter chat for YPs
Use Twitter Analytics to determine optimal
time
Data will point to certain times, days with
higher engagement.
Data will point to topic people have engaged
with in the past
43. Kevin’s Goal: Increase reach of letter writing
campaign
Character count of 150-250 received better ROI
Posts with media received better ROI
Links posted before 10am, after 5pm had better
ROI
Optimal posts had 150-250 characters with
media, posted in morning or evening
44. Kevin’s Goal: Increase buzz, traffic to
registration site
Posts with interviews had better ROI
Posts with direct links to registration site
within the post had better ROI
Kevin’s Plan: An interview with a long-time
members with a link to registration site
45. If you provide value, members will pay for that value
If you can provide that value through social media, social
media becomes an asset
1st step to ROI of social media is knowing your goals
2nd step is knowing your input
3rd step is collecting the numbers that matter.
4th step is comparing data with input, gauging bang for buck
5th step is writing it down and presenting it to your
colleagues/boss/board and so you can fine tune strategy
6th (final) step is drawing on the ROI data to improve strategy
ROI isn’t all about numbers or a magical formula; it’s about
discovering value, measuring value and costing value
Hello everyone, good morning and welcome to Uncovering the Bottom Line: Finding the ROI in your Association’s Social Media Strategy.
My name is Marc Cousineau and I’ll give you a little background on myself before we get started.
I am the president of Incline Marketing, which is a communications and online marketing company that specializes in helping associations, non-profits and small businesses develop strategies that help them achieve their goals with maximum return on investment. I work with non-profits in several industries including healthcare and sport and I’ve been working on fine-tuning the calculation of ROI in social media for the better part of three years now.
I’m always a little hesitant to mention this last biographical piece about me because I feel it might cause people to doubt my judgement, but here it goes; I’m a Maple Leafs fan, which is bordering on insane.
But anyway, to the task at hand, figuring out ROI in social media. Any of you on Twitter can follow along with the presentation on there by following Incline Marketing or my personal handle. There will be tweets summarizing the material as we go along.
So, social media. This is the look a lot of people get when asked about social media, especially when it comes to determining ROI; the deer in the headlights look. Well, I’m going to try to get you out of jam. But first thing’s first, we need to know if social media actually does anything to help associations.
This is the big question. You’re investing time, money and resources into Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or some other online platform because it’s what everyone else is doing, but the truth is, you’re wondering if it’s even worth it.
Let’s look at this from a big picture point of view and then zoom in. The reason anyone, anywhere invests money in a product or service is because they find value in that product or service. People go to McDonald’s because it’s valuable to them. They get a hot meal on the cheap without waiting around. The same goes for associations. People pay for membership, events, certifications and other association services because they find it valuable. So, the question becomes, how does social media add value for members?
We have to start with what members value. I’m sure they value a cheap, hot meal, but associations are not fast food restaurants, so we need to know why members join. In a recent survey by Wiley Societies, which polled almost 10,000 members of member organizations, the top three reasons members join associations are the quality of the society or association’s research-based content, closely followed by the prestige of the organization and networking opportunities. Let’s look at these three value factors and see if social media provides them to your members.
This first piece of value is based around access to information. Members value the information associations disseminate to their members in the form of workshops, trade magazines, newsletters, etc. This is so for a reason. We are living in the information age.
Information is valuable and it’s even more valuable if it can be accessed quickly and easily. Your target market is looking for information and they are going to go to the source that is the easiest, quickest and highest quality.
Social media is a great way to be all those things for your members. Your association has access to the most knowledgeable people in your industry. Share the information they have with your members. When they find the content valuable, they will find the source valuable as well.
Take a look at Wikipedia. It’s a fast, easily accessible source of information that is of higher and higher quality every day. People not only contribute to Wikipedia by writing articles, they donate money too. The reason is because people find it a valuable source of information. You can do this with you association’s social media.
A blog provides tons of information to members and non-members about recent legislation or relevant news in the industry. People will find it valuable and will be more likely to invest time and money in keeping the source (ie your association) in business.
The next most valuable element of membership is prestige of the organization.
If you can put that you’ve been a member of an association for 20 years on your resume, you’re going to look better than the person who hasn’t done as much to help their industry or professional development.
Social media is a great way to convey the “show-off” benefits of membership. In other words, you’re part of the association, so we’re going to highlight your accomplishments.
Prestige is all about recognition and social media is a great way to recognize members.
For example, write a blog profiling a long time member, create a YouTube video interviewing an award winner, create a “wall-of-fame” Pinterest board for members with notable accomplishments or post on Twitter and Facebook congratulating a member on a recent job well done.
These are all ways you lend some prestige to a member while letting other people know recognition comes with the title of member.
The last of the three major pieces of value for members is networking.
Social networking sites aren’t called that because it sounds catchy; they’re in the business of connecting people with others just like them.
Your association has the opportunity to facilitate this connection and become even more valuable to members and potential members.
Why do members go to conferences? To network. What is one of the reasons members join committees? To network.
Social media gives your members a chance to network online, quickly and easily. When they see the value of sharing ideas on a Twitter chat led by your association or participating in a discussion on your Facebook page, it will be easier to see the value in your organization’s other networking offerings.
These three elements aren’t the only value points your association offers members. That’s why the final piece of the puzzle is social media’s ability to highlight extra areas of value for members.
As an example, you can create an infographic blog post about the value an association offers members vs. non-members, as well as a tweet and a Facebook post sharing the information.
Another example is a timeline blog post of an association’s lobby efforts and the corresponding pin on Pinterest and tweet.
Educate your members about value and they will learn to see the value in your organization.
Just because social media brings value to members doesn’t mean it’s all sunshine and rainbows. If you’re looking at social media as a cash cow or the answer to all your association’s problems, you’re barking up the wrong tree. The reason is because social media is very often a loss leader.
As some of you may know, a loss leader is a product, service or initiative that will lose money, but will also get people in the door to spend elsewhere. Take this situation for example; a hardware store decides to grill hotdogs on their BBQs in the “outdoor” aisle and give them away for free. The hotdogs are not making the store any money; in fact, they are losing money on the hotdogs. However, the free food gets people in the door, gets people down that aisle, gets people looking at the BBQs and patio furniture and makes it more likely that they will buy something.
Social media acts the same way much of the time for associations. It brings members and non-members in the door, so to speak, and makes it more likely that they will invest in the association. No member is likely to pay for access to your association’s social media accounts, but they may just invest in membership or conference attendance after being led to your website from your Twitter account.
So, so far we know social media can be valuable to members, but it will likely be a loss leader. The question now becomes, what exactly are we, as an association, getting out of social media? This leads us to...
ROI! Before we really delve deep into the swampy waters that is calculating return on investment in social media, I wanted to ask you how you define ROI? What does it mean when you hear that?
Those are all interesting takes on ROI in general. The best way I’ve heard ROI explained for social media was when someone compared it to giving someone flowers. When you give your spouse or partner some flowers, you can’t quantify how much it’ll benefit you. There’s no equation on a spreadsheet that will tell you that one dozen roses given once a month will increase the number of times you’re allowed to choose what movie you watch on Netflix by 10%. However, you do know that your spouse or partner is happier because of the flowers, unless their allergic to flowers and then you’re just screwed.
The bottom line is, finding ROI in your social media efforts isn’t just a case of plugging in some numbers and finding that X number of dollars spent on Twitter meant Y number of new members in June. All is not lost though. There is a way to analyze your social media efforts to see if it’s really worth all the work. There will be no magic formula, but there will be numbers, there will be talk about member value and there will be...Kevin.
So here’s a little bit of a rundown about Kevin. He’s in the association business. He actually works for the Canadian Donut Manufacturers Association, which sounds like a pretty SWEET job, pardon the pun. When Kevin isn’t being insanely photogenic and using outdated cellular technology, he runs the CDMA’s communications.
Part of Kevin’s role is executing the association’s social media strategy, which is what he’s been doing for two years. Over those two years, he’s been establishing the association on Twitter, Facebook and a blog. He’s done a pretty good job, tweeting every day, updating Facebook all the time, having conversations with members on each platform and generating lots of discussion with the blog. Despite all this, Kevin is in trouble.
The problem is one a lot of you have faced at some point. The association is up against it budget-wise and the board of directors and the executive director are looking for ways to cut costs. They want to know if social media is doing them any good. If not, Kevin’s hours and salary are going to be slashed. What he needs to prove is a decent ROI. The problem, he has no clue where to start. He kind of looks like the deer on that first slide. Luckily, Kevin is a creation of my mind and I can get him up to speed in next hour or so and hopefully save his job.
Before you go about calculating ROI on social media, you need to really understand what ROI means. We all know it stands for return on investment. But to analyze it successfully, you need to break down each component and know what it means to your organization in your specific circumstance. First things first, you need to know what sort of return you’re looking for; you need to determine your goals and how you’re going to measure if you’ve reached them or not. This shouldn’t really mean dollars and cents. If you’re going into this thinking, “My goal is to make the association $25,000 in membership fees and event registration,” you’re going to fail every time. It should be about taking the goals of your association as a whole and fitting them to your social media efforts.
When Kevin looked at the CADM’s goals for the previous year, he saw that there were three main ones; increased event attendance and engagement, the creation of an advocacy strategy and more interaction with young professionals in the industry. The next step for Kevin is to decide how these big-picture goals translate into goals for social media.
So how could Kevin gauge the goal of creating an advocacy strategy on social media (Ask the audience)? Yes, Kevin thought about all those goals, and came to this conclusion, the goal was to get more people aware of the advocacy material and efforts put forth by the CADM.
With the goal of event attendance and engagement, his goal was to expand the reach of the promotion for the annual conference and the number of people talking about it and how many people went to the registration site.
Finally, with regards to connecting with young professionals, Kevin’s goal on social media was to create an environment where young pros could connect with the organization, find value in its resources and contribute to the organization.
Now that Kevin knows his goals, he is one step close to finding out if he’s reached them and to what extent he succeeded (or didn’t).
The other part of that ROI equation we were talking about is investment. You 100% need to know what you’ve put into social media to evaluate what you’ve taken out of it. Input isn’t just about money, although it does factor into your analysis. It’s also about time and the amount of content you have produced. It’s about how effective and efficient each dollar, each hour or each tweet has been in achieving your goals.
Measuring your input is going to be dependent on the role social media plays in your overall job and on the goals you have set. In Kevin’s situation, since none of the social media efforts cost him anything other than time, the financial investment can be calculated as a portion of his salary, since time is money. Kevin’s annual salary is $48,000. He spends about 25% of his time on social media. Over the course of a year, this means the CADM is spending $12,000 of Kevin’s salary on social media. This works out to a nice round $1,000 a month. This is an over-simplification, but it gives a good idea of how you can quantify the time and money spent on social media overall.
Calculating investment needs to be a little more detailed as well. You can get this detail by looking at your goals and calculating how much was invested in the attempt to achieve this goal. For example, one of Kevin’s goals is to connect more young professionals with the association. He went back over all the tweets be posted that were geared towards young professionals, such as links to seminars, blog posts, resources from the association website and discussion topics he put forth. The total came to 78 tweets. The number of total tweets he published in the last year was 520, which means the young pro tweets make up 15% of the total. If each platform required the same financial investment, Twitter cost $4,000 for a whole year. So the financial investment in young pro content on Twitter would equal $600 for one year.
The bottom line is, you need to know your numbers. If you want to calculate ROI, you need to become real good friends with data. You have to know exactly how much you have put in to know exactly what you can take out. You can never have too many numbers. The key is to realize which ones help you come to a conclusion and which ones are just there for curiosity’s sake. Once you know your goals, you can calculate your investment and once you know your investment, you can calculate your success, or your ROI.
So how did Kevin do with his goal of connecting more young professionals with the association? We already know what he invested in the pursuit of the goal, but we don’t know what the success rate was. To figure this out, Kevin has to become real good friends with data.
Like I said before, data is the lifeblood of social media analysis. Without it, finding ROI becomes alchemy; a practice with flimsy science behind it that will not help you in the long-term.
We already know that Kevin tweeted relevant content 78 times in the last year, which meant the equivalent of $600. Now we need to know which numbers to look at to gauge success. What statistics might be look at from Twitter to measure Kevin’s success (ask audience)?
Those could all be relevant, and the best ones I can see are total interactions, URL clicks, year over year average engagement and Key Influencers.
Total interactions gauge how often people are connecting and sharing your content. It means things like retweets, favourites, mentions and clicks. What these mean, pretty much, is that people are finding your content valuable. When people find value in content, they will find value in the organization behind the content. Kevin’s goal is to connect young professionals with content they find valuable.
URL clicks are a good indicator of how much traffic your account is moving to the content you posted. Not only is it an indicator of how valuable people find your content, it’s also helpful in analyzing how much traffic a certain tweet is directing to your website. One of Kevin’s goals is to bring awareness to the resources and expertise the CADM can bring to young professionals, so knowing the traffic that has been directed to these resources through Twitter is important.
Year over year average engagement is important in examining how much progress you have made in the last year on your goal and thus, how effective your efforts have been. Engagement is a ratio that show the number of people who have engaged with your content to the number of people who have viewed it. If 100 people see your content and two people engage with it, the engagement number is 2%. You can calculate the average engagement for a certain set of tweets. Comparing this year’s number to last year’s number can help Kevin understand if he has been more effective at engaging young professionals, starting conversations with them and providing them value.
Key influencers is just another way to say your target audience or the people you want to reach most with your tweets. These are the people you want to connect with the most because they are the most likely to find value in your efforts and invest in your organization in some way. For Kevin, understanding how many key influencers started following the association’s account can help him understand if he is reaching the right people and if he is maximizing the value of his efforts by reaching them.
Before you start to freak out and wonder where you’re possibly going to get these numbers, the answer is extremely easy. Twitter analytics has a pretty solid list of statistics, including the stats on the last slide. If you have a Twitter account you can access Twitter Analytics. When you export the stats, it will come in a spread sheet and you can plug in whatever formulas you need to crunch the numbers.
So, Kevin went ahead and crunched the numbers and here’s what he found: The 78 tweets on young professionals received 210 interactions and an average engagement of 2.4%. He also calculated that out of these 78 tweets, 22 of them included links to content on the CADM website and these links received 92 clicks. Don’t worry about the specific numbers, they’re arbitrary and only necessary so we can have some fun with equations.
All this is great. Kevin can walk up to his bosses tomorrow and show them that Twitter is indeed engaging young professionals. But he would probably only get so far until things fell apart. Kevin needs to calculate how much was spent on gaining those interactions and also show some progress in order to get the full ROI.
Kevin started by calculating the cost-per-interaction. This will help him determine how much was spent to get each of the 210 interactions he received. The simple formula for finding this out is money spent divided by interactions gained. Kevin spent $600 and gained 210 interactions, so his cost-per-interaction is $2.87. For every $2.87 spent by the CADM, the association is interacting with a young professional and providing them value. Kevin went back into his files and saw that two years ago, he also tweeted 78 times with young pro content (what a coincidence!) and only received 172 interactions, which means his cost-per-interaction was $3.49, or 21% higher than this year’s.
Kevin then moved onto cost-per-click. Remember, there were 22 links to CADM material on the association’s website and they received 92 clicks.
If you do the math, these 22 links/tweets cost $169.23 and produced 92 instances when traffic was directed to the CADM website. This means that the cost-per-click was $1.84. For every $1.84 spent by Kevin/the CADM, one individual was directed to the association’s website.
Website traffic is important for many reasons, but in this situation, it’s important because there are so many different resources competing for the attention of young professionals. This audience, in turn, has a pretty good handle on identifying important sources of content and going back to them frequently.
Kevin is establishing the CADM’s website as a valuable, go-to resource for young professionals and thus, making the organization valuable as a whole. The more valuable and comfortable people find the association, the more likely they are to invest in it.
Finally, Kevin took a look at average engagement. The average engagement for this past year’s crop of tweets for young professionals was 2.4%. Note: this number shows up as 0.02400 on Twitter Analytics. This means, for example, that if these tweets were seen 8,750 times, they produced 210 engagements.
After doing an analysis, Kevin found out that two years ago, the average engagement rate for the same category of tweets was 2.02% (8,500 people saw the tweets, but only produced 172 engagements).
This may not seem like a large number, but when seen in a bigger picture, it means 38 more interactions per year or 3 interactions per month. It also means that the association’s resources are being used more effectively and are being maximized. Therefore, the return on investment is larger compared to one year ago. The investment in social media is yielding results and they are ever-improving results!
The final area Kevin looked at was key influencers. Kevin decided he needed to know how much it was costing the association to get the attention of each key influencer or the cost-per-key influencer. The first step in determining the cost-per-influencer is to establish who your target is. In Kevin’s situation, he determined his key influencers to be young professionals. He broke this down into different sub-sections since most people don’t write “young professional” on their profiles. He came away with three sub-sections; students, assistant bakers and culinary instructors. Students because they are the future young professionals, assistants because it is safe to assume they are the most likely to just be starting out and are therefore only assistants and instructors because they have a following of students and newly graduated members.
The next step is to go through your followers list and determine how many of them fall into these categories. Kevin saw that out of 500 new followers in the past year, 172 fell into the categories he was looking for. He then calculated the cost-per-influencer by taking the total money spent on Twitter, which was $4000, and dividing it by the number of key influencers gained. He ended up with $23.26. Therefore, it cost the association $23.26 to get each person involved in young professionals to pay attention to the Twitter account. What’s great about this stat is that it is not a one-time thing like a retweet or a favourite. Theoretically, once you have a follower, they are most likely going to be a loyal one. Therefore, the longer you tweet, the more return you are getting on that money you spent.
Kevin also looked at his cost-per-influencer the year previous and discovered that out of 400 new followers, 115 were key influencers for a CPI of $34.78. Kevin saw that he cut his cost by over 30% from year to year and was therefore getting a better return on investment.
Kevin’s next goal was to help the CADM build an advocacy strategy. The CADM has only recently gotten into the government relations game and they have been building an advocacy strategy for three years. Over the last year, the CADM has met with government officials three times in their effort to allow businesses to write off 50% of expenses when buying donuts for corporate events, client meetings, AGMs, etc. Kevin’s goal on social media is to bring awareness to the CADM’s efforts and engage members in answering the calls to action.
As you know, data is a big part of understanding if Kevin has been successful. First we need to know what Kevin as invested on Facebook in the name of advocacy. Kevin traced his effort on Facebook for the last year and established that he posted 40 pieces of content related to advocacy, lobbying and calls to action times. These 40 posts constituted 25% of the CADM’s total content on Facebook. Using the same formula from Twitter, this means there was $1,000 spent on these posts.
Now that we know how much was invested in pursuing advocacy on Facebook, what statistics should we look at to find out if they’re providing any value to members and the association? Does anyone have any suggestions? (Ask Audience). Those are all great numbers to highlight and the most important ones are once again total interactions, clicks on links and engagement rate. A fourth statistic to keep in mind is post reach.
Part of any government relations and advocacy strategy is to engage members. If members are not knowledgeable about the issues and taking part in the association’s activities, the strategy loses steam. One of Kevin’s main goals was increase engagement through social media. Tracking total interactions is a perfect way to analyze whether the CADM’s Facebook efforts are increasing overall engagement with the association’s advocacy strategy and providing a return on investment.
When Kevin accessed the Insights section of the association’s Facebook page, he was able to click on Posts and see engagement statistics from all his posts for the last two years. After picking out the 40 pieces of advocacy content in the last year, the number of engagements (likes, shares, comments and clicks) was at 310. This is compared to the 193 interactions on 31 posts in the year previous to this one. After doing the math (money spent divided by interactions earned) Kevin figured that the CADM spent about $3.23 for every interaction over the past year. He also discovered that in the year previous, the organization spent about $4.02 for every interaction. The investment in advocacy on Facebook was greater in this last year than in the previous year, but the return was greater. More people were engaged for less money, meaning the goal of building an advocacy plan was moved forward more efficiently and cost-effective.
The next statistic is clicks on links, which is a sub-section of engagement. Seeing a “like” on an advocacy post is great, it means people saw the post, most likely took the time to read what it was about, liked what they saw and engaged with it. This adds value to both members and the association, but it is only a surface interaction. It’s the “least you could do” type of action; slacktivism at its finest.
However, clicking a link means the person was not only engaged enough to pursue the content you posted, but is more likely to answer the call to action in an advocacy situation. For example, Kevin posted a link to the CADM’s website which contained a sample letter members could send to their MPs about the tax issue on several occasions. The more people who clicked on this link, the more people who were likely to write a letter and progress the lobbying efforts of the association.
Kevin examined the amount of links he posted to Facebook related to advocacy efforts and the number of clicks they generated. These posts included links to news articles about the lobbying days the CADM was involved in, blog posts from the association and calls to action, such as the letter described above. He determined that there were 10 links with 75 clicks. The 10 links represented a quarter of the total advocacy posts and thus a quarter of the money spent on these posts, which is $250. Therefore, the average cost-per-click was $3.33. Kevin decided that spending $3.33 per person for only 75 people to educate and encourage them to act was not very efficient and had to be looked at in the future. Although the social media efforts yielded some value and a step towards the goal, it wasn’t a big enough step for Kevin.
Lastly, total reach and engagement rate. These two statistics go hand in hand. As I said before, Kevin’s big goal in promoting the advocacy strategy on Facebook was getting the word out. Calculating how many people he reached and how many resources this took is crucial to knowing how successful he was.
With the 40 advocacy-focused posts in the past year, Kevin reached 24,000 people. This means that for every person who Kevin reached with the CADM’s advocacy material, the association spent about $0.041. Kevin reached 14,500 people in the year previous, meaning the cost-per-reach was about $0.053. First things first; for the money invested in attracting awareness for the CADM’s advocacy strategy, social media can make a bigger impact and go further in accomplishing this goal than most other media. Email click through rates and mailing lists are dropping, especially with CASL. Direct mail can’t guarantee you people with pay attention and it usually costs more than $0.04 a letter. The bottom line is, social media is going to give you more bang for buck in terms of generating awareness, which was Kevin’s big goal. Thus, better ROI. Also, the difference from year to year in the example above seems negligible, but in the overall scheme of things, it proves that the return is higher and the costs are less. In a business where every cent is counted, associations have to pay attention to this number, even if it fluctuates by half a cent.
Now for the engagement rate. This is the number that tells you what percentage of people engaged with your content out of how many people the content reached. For example, if 100 people saw your content and two people engaged, the engagement rate would be 2%. Unfortunately, on Facebook, you need to do this calculation manually, unlike on Twitter Analytics. For Kevin, his advocacy posts generated 24,000 impressions and received 310 interactions. Therefore, the engagement rate was 1.29%. The previous year, the engagement rate was 1.33%. Therefore, a smaller percentage of people who saw the CADM’s posts interacted with it, but not by much. Kevin has managed to convert almost the same percentage of people from seeing the content to engaging with it (eyes to action). Couple this with the increased number of people who have seen the content, this means Kevin is being successful in boosting awareness of the cause. Therefore the ROI is higher.
And now we come to the blog, the elder statesman of social media. Blogs have been around for a long time and for good reason. Blogs are informative, accessible, shareable, engaging and go outside the box. Which is why Kevin really likes them.
Kevin likes publishing the CADM’s blog so much that he published 25 times in the last year, or about once every other week. Out of these 25 blog posts, seven pertained to the annual conference. These posts include an interview with a long-time exhibitor, a how-to guide and an infographic about Toronto, which is the city where the conference will take place. The CADM’s goal was to increase event attendance. Kevin looked at this goal and decided his goal with the conference-oriented blog posts was to increase awareness of the event’s value and drive traffic to the registration page.
Now that we know Kevin’s goal, we need to know his input. Since we have already determined that the monetary investment in the CADM’s blog is $4,000, we can determine that each blog post cost $160 to create. Therefore, the blog posts about events cost a total of $1,120.
Now we know the input, it’s time to reacquaint ourselves with our best friend; data. There are a few ways you can get data for your blog. You can data from outside sources, such as Twitter or Facebook. You can use much the same tools and techniques as I described before to analyze how your blog is doing. Stats like impressions, reach and URL clicks will tell you how much awareness you are generating. However, the best tool to analyze your the success of your blog is Google Analytics. It’s a simple application to install into your website that tracks pretty much every number you’d want to analyze. Messing with a website’s code is not my strong suite, but installing Google Analytics took me almost no time. If you’re really stuck, don’t worry, just call that special tech person in your life and get them to help you. Believe me, you’re going to want Google Analytics, so do all the work necessary to get it plugged into your website.
Like I said, there’s every number you can imagine on Google Analytics, but for the sake of keeping things simple and ensuring everyone’s sanity, I’ll take a look at sessions, session duration and landing pages/user flow. The place to start when looking at blog posts on Google Analytics is the pages section. This section shows you the statistics for all the pages people have accessed.
The first number to pay attention to is sessions. This will tell you how many times a specific page was visited. While one person can account for 14 sessions by going on your site 14 times in a day, this numbers is usually a good indicator of how much traffic is going to your website and a certain page. The more people who visit your blog, the more value you are providing to a larger audience and the more awareness you are generating of your organization’s expertise and services. Kevin saw that for his seven conference blog posts, he received 644 sessions. To determine the ROI on these posts, Kevin has to calculate the cost-per-sessions. The cost-per-sessions for the conference posts was $1.74. For every person who viewed the conference blog posts, the CADM spent $1.74.
The next piece of the puzzle is finding out how long people stayed on your blog post or the session duration. If people stay on your post longer, it signifies that they are finding value in your content. More value means a greater chance that they will spend time on other parts of your website and invest in your association, whether that’s with event registration, buying a trade show booth or even volunteering to be on the conference planning committee. Again, you can look at a specific page, it’s corresponding number of sessions and its average session duration to figure out total time spent on that page. Visitors spent an average of 5 minutes and 46 seconds on the conference blog posts, which means the total time spent was 3,713 minutes. Since the CADM spent $1,120 on these posts, this means that for every minute of someone’s attention, they spent $0.30. Therefore, the cost-per-minute is $0.30.
The last piece of the puzzle is examining the landing page statistics and user flow, or how visitors to your site get there and where they go once they are there.
The landing page section lays out where visitors to your website are entering through. Examining the landing numbers will help you understand how people are accessing certain parts of your website.
Examining the user flow chart will allow you to see where visitors went from your landing page. If your website was a house, your landing page might be your front hallway. The user flow chart will tell you if they then went to the kitchen and then the basement or if they went to the living room and then the dining room.
Looking at these numbers will be able to tell you if one page of your website is having an effect on another page. This is important in Kevin’s scenario because he wants to know if he is achieving his goal of driving traffic to the registration page from the blog.
The User Flow stats look a little something like this...
So on the left side, starting out, is the landing pages or the starting pages. You can see that out of 277 sessions, 184 went on to other parts of the site and there were 138 “drop offs” or 138 people who only looked at the landing page.
Then you can see where people went from the landing page and that 50 went to the blog, 21 went to the “who we are” page, etc. You can also see that it splits up even more. The user flow will show you how people went from one page to another.
There are five steps to establishing the correlation between a certain the blog as a landing page and another area of your site. The first is to set date parameters for your data collection. Kevin started this process by examining the two week periods in which the conference blog posts were published. For example, if a conference post was published on July 1, he looked at the period between July 1 and July 14, when the next blog post was published.
The first step is to analyze the user flow from the these dates and determine how many times the blog was established as the landing page. In the 14 weeks Kevin examined, 400 visitors landed on the site because of the blog.
The next step is to determine how many times the blog led people directly to the other page of interest which in this situation is the registration page. Kevin saw that out of these 400 visitors that landed on the blog, 110 went directly to the registration page.
The third step is to look at how many people visited the blog as a second, third, fourth, etc. interaction or, in other words, when it wasn’t the landing page. Then you need to see how many people went to the registration page from there. Kevin saw that 205 people went to the blog as a second and third interaction and 43 of them then went directly to the registration page.
The fourth step is to combine the two sets of numbers and calculate the percentage of people that made that trip from blog to registration page. Kevin saw that out of 605 blog visitors, 153 went directly to the registration page, or 25.3%.
The final step is to compare this to the data to the percentage of people went from another page to the registration page. Kevin totalled this up and saw that the flow-through rate to the registration page was 14.2% from other pages, meaning that the blog was much more effective than other means at pushing traffic to the desired page. Therefore, the blog is doing its job and the return on investment is high. Keep track of this number through the months and see if it changes. A higher percentage means a better ROI.
Kevin has gone through a lot of numbers and calculations and is tired. He just wants to go home and enjoy a nice summer afternoon in July. Unfortunately, Kevin is not done. Getting the data, parsing it and calculating the ROI is only three-quarters of the battle when it comes to social media. It’s like a chef designing a menu, cooking a perfect meal and then leaving it in the oven. He forgot one of the most important parts; presenting it to the food critic at table seven. Kevin has to know how to present the data to other staff members and executives at the association to ensure everyone is in the loop and everyone understands. This way, the board and executive director can make informed decisions and the staff can contribute to the social media strategy to make it even more effective.
Now this situation might seem familiar to some of you; you believe in the value of Twitter or Facebook or blogging or any other social media platform for your association, but you come up against skeptical execs or board members or staff. It’s not uncommon, especially because in a world where budgets are tight and ROI matters a great deal, determining the impact of social media can seem like catching smoke in your hands. But explaining the value of social media is like lobbying a government official or trying to convince members to join or rejoin; you need to come armed with data and numbers. That’s the only way a lot of the time and that’s why reporting is so key.
Reporting is a crucial component to success on social media and conveying the ROI to both yourself and others in the organization. The main benefit of regular progress reports for yourself is that it tells you on a weekly, monthly or quarterly basis how you are doing with your goals, if the ROI is headed in the right direction and where your efforts might better placed. The benefit for others in the organization is similar. If they know where the social media efforts are weak and where they are strong, they can better understand where to invest resources and how social media is fitting into the overall strategic plan of the association. It makes social media more valuable, but it also makes you more valuable. With data in hand, no one can accuse you of using flimsy explanations to prop up your pursuit of a pet project.
Reporting is not a time-consuming process, especially once you get the hang of it. I create reports for clients on a monthly basis, but you can decide, with other members of your organization, how often reporting needs to be done. I suggest a weekly report at the most and a quarterly report at least. Any more than that and the data set isn’t big enough to make conclusions and any less than that and you lose out on key insights in time to capitalize on them.
I’m going to tell you how I create a Twitter report for my clients, but do not hesitate to create your own templates for your reports. You know your organizations and social media efforts better than anyone and the report should fit in with the resources and platforms available to you.
I’m going to take you through a monthly Twitter report. The first thing to do is summarize all the key numbers that the account generated over the past month; followers (and related numbers like increase, etc), retweets, mentions, clicks, impressions, etc. The next step is to capture what I call significant posts and interactions. These are the posts with the highest number of individual interactions. This can tell you which content was most popular, on what day and at what time to what audience. Choose another 2-4 tweets that captured significant interactions, whether it was a retweet from an influential follower or a really high percentage of engagement, and break down why it was successful and what it means for the goals of your account.
The next step is to go through your new followers for the month. I believe quality is better than quantity when it comes to Twitter followers, especially associations. It’s better to have 10 out of 10 new followers be members than to have 30 new followers and only 2 of them members. Break the new followers into demographics and determine how many are key influencers. Bonus ROI tip: calculating the cost-per-key-influencer is another good way to know how much it’s costing you to get the right people to pay attention to your message and if you’re meeting your goal of spreading awareness among the right audience.
Finally, conduct a final analysis. This is where you parse the data, present the return on investment, review the goals and the results and make plans for the future. At the end of your report, you have a 4-6 page document that highlights everything your executive or board needs to know. Sometimes it’s not practical or realistic to expect the executives to read the full report. Summarizing the report into key ROI findings and future benchmarks helps speed the process along. Adding a glossary of terms to the beginning or end of the report will also help those people who are unfamiliar with the jargon of social media-speak.
To capitalize on the momentum of the CADM’s young professional programming, Kevin wants to organize a Twitter chat for young professionals. For anyone who is unfamiliar with the concept of a Twitter chat, it’s like an open roundtable that happens online. Anyone can join in and discuss certain topics and questions with people from similar professions. For example, the association chat happens almost every Tuesday afternoon. The moderator will chose a topic, ask questions and facilitate discussion. It’s a great tool for sharing of ideas, networking, awareness and education.
Kevin wants to organize a chat for young professionals, but he wants to know the conditions that will make it as successful as possible. To do this, he uses data once again. He looked over the past three months of Twitter activity and discovered the tweets relating to young professionals received twice as many interactions and three times as many impressions on average when they were posted between 1 and 3 pm as opposed to 8 and 11 am. He also realized that he received a higher engagement rate on these tweets on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday than the other days of the week. This helped Kevin decide that the best time to start the chat would be 1:30 pm on a Wednesday.
Kevin also wanted to know which topic to pursue in the Twitter chat. On looking at the clicks from links for blog posts pertaining to young professionals over the last 6 months, he was able to see that the most traffic coming from Twitter was through two blog posts. One was about creating a great resume and the other was about interviewing tips for those in the industry. Kevin was able to deduce that a Twitter chat on searching for a job and tips on getting that job would draw the biggest crowd and the most engagement. By using date and subject maximization, Kevin is able to create a Twitter chat that will maximize the ROI.
Kevin’s next big project for Facebook is to get the CADM’s members involved in a letter writing campaign. The goal of the association is to get members to write to their local Member of Parliament about the tax issue they are lobbying against. Kevin wants to help the association boost the response to the association’s call to action. Therefore, Kevin’s goal is to increase the reach of the campaign, increase engagement and drive traffic to website page that contains the letter and instructions to members.
Kevin can use his knowledge of his Facebook ROI to create an effective strategy that will help him achieve this task. Every Facebook post has to be constructed to generate maximum engagement, much a house for sale must be laid out in a way that will attract the most offers. To determine how to build his posts about the letter campaign, Kevin looked back at the most successful advocacy posts on Facebook. The first place he looked was at length of the post. The posts with a character length between 150 and 250 generated a lower cost-per-reach and cost-per-interaction rate than those posts above or below this character count. Therefore, Kevin can conclude that he has a better chance of reaching his goal with a better ROI with posts between 150-250 characters.
The next element Kevin looked at was media. Upon looking at his previous advocacy posts, he discovered that posts with a photo or video had a higher engagement rate and a lower cost-per-interaction than those posts without any media. Just like with the character count, Kevin decided to trust this data and include more photos and videos to his posts about the letter writing campaign.
Lastly, Kevin looked at the date and time of his most successful advocacy posts. He realized that the posts with links had a lower cost-per-click rate when he posted them before 10 am or after 5 pm. Since one of Kevin’s goals with the letter writing campaign was to drive more traffic to the letter writing advocacy kit, Kevin paid close attention to this data. He figured that posting during these times could help him achieve his goal and do so with a better ROI.
At the end of the day, after reviewing the data, Kevin decided on structuring many of his letter writing campaign posts with 150-250 characters, some form of media (photos, videos, infographics, etc) and either early in the morning or sometime in the evening. He would review the effectiveness of his posts and this strategy each month and adjust or fine tune accordingly.
The CADM’s next conference is a big one; it’s the 25th anniversary of the association and everyone wants it to be special to mark the occasion. There’s only one problem: Registration is down. With four months left until the conference starts, registration is 10% below the target for this point. Kevin’s goal is to generate more buzz about the event through the association’s blog in hopes of driving more traffic to the registration page and increasing the likelihood of registration.
Kevin examined his previous conference blog posts in order to draw on the data and create a blogging strategy that will achieve his goal. He paid the most attention to the session counts, user flow and pages per session. He found that out of the seven previous conference blog posts, the top two in each category were posts with interviews. One was an interview with the head of the event committee and other was an interview with a speaker who was going to be at the event. Kevin decided that one of his next two blog posts were therefore going to include an interview with a 25-year member who had frequented the conference throughout the years.
Kevin also examined the next two most popular conference blog posts, which had an elevated percentage of flow-through traffic from the blog to the registration page visits (42% average compared to an average of 19% for the bottom three blog posts). On examining these two posts, he realized that these were the only two that included a link to the registration page. These posts made it easy for visitors to navigate to the registration page and therefore, more traffic was going that way. Kevin decided to place these links in all previous conference blog posts and future ones as well in order to draw traffic to the registration page and further increase the ROI of the blog.
- If your association can provide value, members will pay for that value
- If you can provide that value through social media, social media becomes an asset
- The first step in determining the ROI of social media is to know your goals.
- The second step is to know your input
- The third step is to collect the numbers and figure out which data sheds the most light on your progress toward your goals.
- The fourth step is to compare the data with your input and gauge whether your are receiving good “bang for your buck.”
- The fifth step is to write it all down and present it in a way that your colleagues, boss and board can understand and in a way that helps you tweak and fine tune your strategy in the short and long term.
- The sixth and final step is to draw on the ROI data you calculated and use it to increase the ROI in future initiatives and strategies.
- ROI isn’t purely about numbers, nor will you find a magical formula that will apply in all situations, but you can find out if you are providing value to members, how valuable you are and how much you spending to provide this value.
