Hey Kevan, great article as always! I was explaining this concept to my client and he found it very useful to read the case study. One word of caution, I think the RoI formula is missing brackets as it's supposed to be (benefits - costs)/costs *100 or (benefits - costs)*100/costs, both would result in the same outcome. Without brackets it exaggerates the costs by a factor of 100 :)

Keep up the good work!

ROI is not metrics, but you need metrics to measure business value of an initiative,
whether it’s driven by social media or not. The equation goes like this:

ROI = Benefits - Costs x 100 = Percentage Return on the Investment
Costs

ROI calculations are based on coming up with numbers for the benefit that the social media
program brought to the company and the costs or investment associated with that program.

Loving the short posts! Keep them coming. :) Blog posts have gotten so long and while the information's really helpful, when you only have a few minutes until your next meeting, it sucks not being able to get through a whole post!

Lol I agree... I have had to become a good skimmer lately. No time!

How much of the target market of 3b at $4 PPV of my video % wise could be gotten if a man who made the UFC 205 14b impressions is raving about it? on social media . 1% of 3b target market ( Social media ) at $4 PPV = $120m. 10% of target market of 3b ( = $1.2b) ( 20% = $2.4b )

I have a blog where I am not selling anything. My core goal is to get more followers and more engagement. What matrices should I be using to track my social media ROI?

Great question, Dolly! If I were you, I would personally track my followers growth and engagement level (or engagement rate). Another great thing to track might be the traffic from social media to your blog 😄

Really nice and crisp article. Very helpful.

I love your tracking ROI Social Media

Thanks for sharing such an informative topic on " Guide to Calculate Social Media ROI". The information you put here is really helpful. The simplest way to measure social media ROI involves measuring your followers on Twitter, your likes on Facebook, and all other social media sites that you are associated with.
http://www.webtage.com/serv...

Hi, I dont get it. I m new to this so excuse mistakes *lol - A brand has 98,000 Fans on FB. The extended circle of those who potentially see a promoted post are 980,000 (say each fan has 100 friends). So we have 970,2000 yet non-followers who could see the post theoretically. Say 0.25% of those actually like the page after the ad and the monetary value per like is calculated at 0.25€. Thats a return of 6063€ for 500€ investment. That sounds totally unrealistic. Where did I go totally wrong? Thanks

I'm with you Sven. I haven't yet understand this. I wonder what can we reply to our customer when after we presented this figures he goes "so, where is my money?" Should we say "it's all in the hypothetically-theory bank"? How do we make the conversion to reality? Anyone can give us a feedback, please?

Thank you Kevan for this great article.
I currently work for a B2B company. in our type of business Leads and Customers are created based on multiple touches; their social actions are only one step of many. This changes the conversation to "social influence on ROI" and makes social ROI measuring even more complicated.
Still your article was on the spot.

Kevan, friend, you delivered! This is EXACTLY the kind of information I've been trying to articulate. I will definitely be using this post for the class I teach and with my clients. Thank you :)

Great post!

Sometimes the ROI of social media is very simple... like in this case where one of our engineers closed a deal worth $585 in recurring revenue with 1 tweet http://blog.close.io/tweet :)

This was a really instructive read.
We ran a full on analysis of our traffic / ROI of each channel... last month and were surprised to see that Quora and Slideshare were the most valuable channels for us. Since then we are focusing mainly on these and Quora now brings us twice times more leads than it used to.

Unrelated but I was wondering reading the article, if anyone ever benefited from running Linkedin ads. Their CPC is really high compared to other channels. We tried promoting both our product and content with their ads but had terrible results. I'd love to hear about anyone else's experience with that.