Social media now holds a place alongside print and broadcast as a major, essential marketing channel for businesses. As such, social media now should be held to the same standard as those channels: your social media ROI needs to contribute to your bottom line. To prove that your social media investment is truly warranted, you need to track how social is influencing every interaction you have with your clients.

The first step involves setting social media goals that complement existing business and departmental goals. If you have set a specific number of leads you’re trying to attain this quarter, set the number of leads you want to specifically be driven by social media. If one of your goals is to increase landing page conversion by say 10%, ensure that you’re tracking the conversion rate of people who land on the page through social channels. Audit your existing social media performance to establish baseline targets, and then set appropriate goals for improvement.

Once you’ve established your social media goals, you’ll need to identify and implement the tools and processes required to measure the ROI on your social media. This may involve adding tracking codes to URLs, building custom landing pages, and more. There are a variety of social media analytics tools which service to track the diverse metrics you are after.

Once you’ve identified what works and what doesn’t work on social, it’s time to adjust your strategy. The point of tracking your social media ROI isn’t just to prove your social campaigns are valuable, it’s to increase their value over time.

Due to the short lifecycle of social media campaigns, a failing campaign should be changed and improved as soon as possible. Social media is never static. To meet your social media ROI goals, you’ll need to constantly update and adapt your strategy taking into account the analytics data you’re tracking. To read the full article visit:http://blog.crazyegg.com/2014/02/10/social-media-roi