Determining your ROI for maintaining a social account can be difficult to wrap your arms around. While it's possible to track dollar-value ROI through connecting sales back to social lead referrals, relying completely on this to understand what social is doing for you causes you to miss the bigger picture. The truth is, you can't clearly state an ROI for things like brand awareness, customer loyalty, and brand goodwill, but all of these things contribute in some way to your overall success, much like a goal in soccer is the result of every player who touched the ball prior to it going into the goal. Understanding that these things do have value even though you can't assign a dollar value to them will help you view your social media efforts more holistically.   Brand Awareness:

• When someone begins their new home search by searching for your company because they've been following you on social media and have been eyeing your home designs for a long time.
• When someone does a new home search and your link ranks #5, but you get clicked on because the user recognizes your brand and not the others.
• When lots of people are searching for your company, you'll start ranking higher for ALL your keywords.

  Customer Loyalty:

• When someone who bought a house from you sees one of your ads and comments how much they loved working with you, and that review gets seen by thousands of people.
• When someone has a complaint that you quickly address via social media and they become more likely to say nice things about you to other people.

  Brand Goodwill:

• When people associate your company with quality and customer care based on what they see from you on social media, they're more likely to recommend you to friends & family.
• When you use social media to talk about your community outreach and people learn good things about you they wouldn't have spent time reading on your website.

How To Track ROI Yes, we said earlier it's hard to determine an exact ROI for these social efforts, but you can get a good idea if you're moving the needle in the right direction by checking these things in your Google Analytics: Bounce Rate: If your bounce rate on social traffic is less than 60%, it means you're at least targeting the right people with your page and ads. The ongoing boost in good traffic will benefit you in the search results over time. Time on Site: The more time someone spends on your site, the more usable it looks to Google. If you're able to consistently drive a high volume of social traffic that spends upwards of 3-4 minutes on the site, you may also see your ranking position improve. Page Views: If your social referral traffic is only looking at one or two pages when they come to your site, it means they're likely not that interested in your content unless you're purposely driving them to a specific landing page and asking them to convert. Looking at these three performance indicators will help you understand if you're targeting the right people on social media. Simply getting thousands of visits to the site from people who would never be interested in buying from you defeats the whole purpose, and at that point you can pretty much guarantee you're not getting any kind of return on your investment. If that's where you are, don't scrap your social budget--hire the right social media expert to assist you with your ads or in crafting your overall presence. As Facebook rises to compete with Google for the best online marketing platform, you definitely won't be sorry you stuck it out with a social strategy.