Doing marketing work via social media channels takes time, effort, and to some extent, money. Collectively, these three things constitute an investment. As with any other business enterprise, it is necessary to have a system in place designed to measure or gauge the success (or failure) of your social media campaigns and consequently, the return of such investment.

Measuring social media ROI is necessary because it presents a broad picture or perspective regarding the performance of your campaigns in terms of social media reach, as well as their overall impact on your organization’s performance over a specific period. On many occasions, clients also demand from their social media managers the data intended to justify the expenses allocated for the said campaigns.

Of course, one of the most obvious ways of gauging social media success is through the number of views, likes, plus ones, shares, or retweets that your content managed to earn. Beyond these figures, however, you can use more substantial measures in gauging social media success. These include site traffic, leads, reach, customer and sales conversions, newsletter signups, PDF downloads, profits figures, number of contact forms and comments made, robustness of contest entries, as well as the scope of social interactions.

Collecting any or all of these data requires the use of proper tools designed specifically to provide accurate insights regarding social media ROI. To help you get started and ensure social media success, 7 free tools for measuring social media ROI are provided in this article, and you should consider using them in your campaigns:

HootSuite

Many social media marketers use HootSuite in analyzing the reach of their content across different platforms. It’s an easy choice because of the depth and usefulness of the data this tool manages to collect. Among these include conversion rate and the sentiment generated around a specific brand. HootSuite also has systems in place to track sources of traffic, as well as analyze stats per post on Twitter, Google Plus, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other platforms.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics has a Campaign Tracking feature. This is useful in tracking social media initiatives, including the number of unique visitors over a given period, volume of sign-ups, as well as on-site conversions.

Facebook Insights

If you have a Facebook page, then Facebook Insights is definitely a valuable resource. This section gives you a comprehensive assessment of your page’s performance. The dashboard has all the valuable information you need, including information regarding the specific posts that your audience responds to the most, how the engagement is, what your page’s reach is like, and the number of likers you have. With over a billion users, Facebook is a rich mine of opportunities to boost brand recall and increase conversion. With Facebook Insights, maximizing your page’s potential becomes easier.

Keyhole

Keyhole is a tool that gives you the capacity to track posts on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Even better, it allows you to track keywords and hashtags across different social media platforms.

Klout

Klout is unique because it conducts daily analysis of the audience that your social media channels manage to attract. Aside from gauging your social media influence and the reach of your content, this ROI measurement tool also offers critical insights on either the growth or reduction of your social media stats.

Buffer

Buffer is particularly useful if you are managing a variety of social media accounts. Primarily, it allows you to schedule content across different social media platforms. It also provides insights on the social interactions generated by your content, as well as audience reach and engagement.

Twitter Analytics

Many organizations use Twitter as their primary social media network, particularly when they have built a solid follower base on this site. As such, Twitter’s own performance measurement tool called Twitter Analytics is a useful resource in analyzing the performance of your tweets in the Twitterverse. Twitter Analytics tracks the performance of your tweets, notably the number of times they have been retweeted and favorited, as well as the replies they have earned. The number of mentions and new followers are also calculated and averaged over specific periods.

The information taken from any of the tools cited above is certainly going to be useful in gauging social media success. The 7 free tools for measuring social media ROI will definitely help you achieve success. Depending on the data, you can either make necessary adjustments, conduct some tweaks, or else carry on with what you have been doing.

Ultimately, having these tools at your disposal is useful and convenient in ensuring social media success.