Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Are you looking for a social media analytics tool that can link social media marketing to sales conversions? Here is my review of Oktopost - which does that.

How do you prove the ROI of your social media efforts? For most people, social ROI is proved by measuring likes, follows, tweets, retweets and clicks because they don’t think they can link social media activity to sales. And truth be told, for most of the inexpensive social media management platform options available click/follow/tweet tracking is all that is offered. But that is changing.

Recently I began testing a new option, Oktopost. Oktopost is a cost effecient, social media management, tracking and reporting platform that tracks clicks, and more importantly conversions, down to the individual Facebook, LinkedIn or G+ post and tweet level. It is this ability to track conversion at the individual post level that I’ve found most helpful as it finally provides a tool to report true social media ROI....

Measuring social media ROI isn't always easy. Many social efforts lend themselves to brand building, community building, and customer service. But done correctly, social media will deliver results. Use these 11 tools to measure ROI and social success.

Business Insider recently published a story on the death of social ROI. They claim that companies are starting to drop the idea that social media ROI can be measured.

I asked Nicole Harrison (@SocialNicole) about this and the importance of ROI in social media. She was adamant that social media done correctly will deliver results and recommended the following list of 11 free tools for measuring both ROI and social media success....

Simple metrics like "followers" and "likes" are usually dismissed by the gurus but actually play an important part in your company's progress...

.Most social media “gurus” will be quick to point out that activity-based metrics such as number of posts, followers, or re-tweets are meaningless because they don’t measure real business value. I’m going to take a contrarian viewpoint today and explain that in the real world, these simple measurements are not only useful, they may be critical.

A few years ago, I was working as a consultant on a new marketing initiative for an extremely conservative, slow-moving company.  As we were getting to know each other, I asked the people around the table “If we gathered here a year from now and you told me that our initiative had been wildly successful, what would have been achieved?”

One of the veterans of the team spoke up: “I would like to see that something … anything … actually HAPPENED!”...