The trend of social media marketing has also made the scope and concept of measuring or calculating social media ROI seem astounding. In fact, it amazes even the most techie-heavy individuals because many so-called social marketing “experts” has simply complicated things and taken out the fun challenge of social media calculations and applications.

Basically, ROI, or return on investment, has its roots in business finance. It still involves numbers, but this is no reason to complicate matters, especially for numbers and statistics allergic persons. Put, social media ROI is what you get back from all the resources, effort, and time you put into social media marketing.

Naturally, there are no monetary calculations with retweets, likes, shares, and other social media marketing help because social media is a no-cost platform and channel to enter into. It’s a zero-dollar investment. Social media would never have proliferated if people had to pay a membership fee to join Facebook or Twitter. This caused the death of such early social media channels as Friendster that offered only a basic platform, and you needed to pay for a premium page for more features. Therefore, since social media is a zero-amount investment, any return from it is already considered ROI.

However, it would help if you still tracked ROI. This is different from calculating or measuring because you need some investment to start with, and social media has zero investment amount. For more social media marketing help in this tracking, you need to identify and then attach a monetary amount to your social media goals and see what you get from them.

Difficult? Not really. Possible? Definitely.

Be specific with your goals. Here’s a list of possibilities and ideas for specific business goals:

• New followers

• Clicks on updated links

• Online purchases

• Signups for newsletters or subscriptions

• Downloads of PDF files and other content

• Time spent on the main webpage

Track those goals

You can choose to use social media marketing help tools for this or not. If a certain goal isn’t that hard to track, you can manually count and track, for instance, the number of sales, downloads, and signups. Interactions may take time since this is tracking and counting shares, follows likes, retweets, etc.

Assign a monetary value to these goals

For general social marketing, for example, you can apply the following:

• Facebook Likes – $0.50 each

• Facebook Purchases – $0.60 for every sale made

• Facebook Shares – $0.50 each

• Promoted Tweet – $3.50 per thousand impressions

• LinkedIn – $2.00 per click

It all depends too on what platform you’re using. In theory, the above is used to measure the money spent on your time doing social marketing. Now calculate how much you earn from each sale or purchase after subtracting other costs, and whatever total, subtract whatever you tracked from your social media business goals.

It wasn’t that difficult, was it?