“I can see the likes and shares, but where’s my revenue?”

A few months ago I showed a Fan Page performance overview to a small business owner. This was his reply. I couldn’t agree more. So he stopped all of his Facebook campaigns, and almost abandoned his Fan Page, because it was only a small part of his revenue that was coming from Facebook.

And he lost lots of money by making that decision.

The thing is, that when you look at your revenues, perhaps you see that “only 3% of my revenues are coming from there”, or “people are not buying from me because of Facebook”, but your customers are wired in another way. Social media makes a pretty huge influence on purchase decisions, even if after engaging with your Fan Page, and looking at some referrals, your customer simply opens a new tab in his browsers, types in your website, and buys. And you see, that it was coming from a direct traffic source.

But how can you measure the actual ROI of your social activity? Here’s my list:

1. The classic top-down approach — Take a look at your social media budget. Now take a look at your trackable revenues coming from social media. Now divide them. Simple as that, but this does not cover the true nature of the way your customers make their decisions.

2. Conversion pixels — It might seem obvious actually, but I experienced too many times that it was simply forgotten. Include your pixels into your landing pages, or have your site developer do it for you. It’ll save you lots of money in a long term.

3. Short URLs — I love bit.ly. I know there are lots of other stuff out there, I just sticked with it. Build whole “channels” out of your bit.ly links, so you’ll know the actual flow of this part of your web traffic.

4. Activate your subscribers — I know the guys at Antavo, they are doing a really great job on how to engage and convert with prospects by channeling social media with email marketing.

5. Use predictive analytics — Here’s an example: If there is a blog article about how apples are good for your health, and it actually goes viral, and engage with a lot of people, you might expect to see an increase in the sales volume of fresh apples. If you do a bit of science and take a look into the data, you’ll see the effect of that particular blog article on the sales volume. Now, that was the actual revenue impact, the business owner I mentioned earlier was looking for answers like this.

But what should you do if you want to leave the fancy math and simply get the info you need? Well, for example you can use our tool, Chartlist, which does the exact same thing. It integrates your data with only a few clicks, and then you’ll see your most valuable posts, with their actual impact on your revenues. It tells you about the most important metrics that represent the real performance of your activity, and helps you optimize your campaigns by setting goals based on ROI. It runs in private beta now, so you can just sign up on the website, and we’ll let you know when it’s available.