Dan Zarella: measure your social media efforts’ ROI against the bottom line

Hubspot's social media scientist Dan Zarella in his recent blog post Need to Justify Social Media? Use Real Numbers About Real Money:

Measuring stuff like “engagement” or “reach” is great, and I recommend advanced social media users do it. But you must understand that those numbers are merely proxy metrics for what really matters: the bottom line.

Or, in other words: if it doesn't make money it doesn't make sense.

Some advice from the same blog post:

• Use coupon codes, referrer analytics, tracking tokens, special offers and landing pages. Get a baseline for how much cash social media is bringing in. If you miss a few sales here or there, that’s not a big deal. In fact if your efforts are only producing barely enough sales to be worthwhile, you’re doing something wrong. Obsessively track the up or down movement of that dollar amount.
• Don’t let customer service or PR users of social media off the hook either. Customer service on Twitter can be faster than on the phone or via email, so calculate the cost per ticket saved, and the customer loss prevented.
• For the PR folks: ask customers how they heard about you. Again, it’s about accuracy not precision here. Your work should be bringing in overwhelming numbers, so a few missed decimal places shouldn’t be the end of the world.