To us, ROI of social media would mean Relevance, Originality and Involving. And this is not a mere clever play with words to evade the question of measurement but a true manner of gauging results.

Like any campaign, social media too starts by understanding the objectives that the brand seeks to achieve. It is the most pivotal step and any evaluation done to measure its success will be strongly dependent on that. This also helps the company manager in understanding what is possible to achieve using social media and the time it will entail. Having understood those, the entire social media strategy is worked with a specific timeline and media elements.

Unlike other mass media, there measurement is not done in reach and frequency terms. Those are evaluation terms for advertising. In social media, there is no advertising and it is important to understand that at the very outset. This media is all about building conversations, dialogue, engaging with people, creating value-adding content and participating in local communities. This does not mean that one cannot monitor it or expect any kind of report.

On the contrary, the report that is submitted is very detailed and specific. Detailed because it lists out all the sites where the seeding has been carried out, gives out list of influencers reached out to and the content (text, photos, tools or videos) created in the process. Specific because it tells the manager the exact number of views seen if a brand video has been uploaded on any video sharing site unlike a TVC where there can never be any form of exact measurement.

So the measurement of social media activity is done both quantitatively and qualitatively. Quantitative measurement would mean the number of people led to the brand website, number of views generated, number of downloads of brand widgets, number of times the brand’s social media release was seen, number of comments and replies received on seeding, number of seeds carried out in various forums, communities and groups.

Qualitative measurement includes the kind of content generated for brand, the quality of response and comments so generated, outreach program carried out for influencers, get brand reviews from experts etc.

Qualitative measurement includes the kind of content generated for brand, the quality of response and comments so generated, outreach program carried out for influencers, get brand reviews from experts etc.

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Read case studies of companies using social media.