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How to calculate social media conversion rate and improve ROI

June 21, 2022

8 min.

Social media is a widespread option for generating loyalty, making your brand recognized, and converting your visitors into customers. That is why you need to know how to calculate social media conversion rate and ROI.

These metrics got a lot of emphasis this year because of the coronavirus, which had a negative effect on companies, so they have to put the effort into Conversion Rate Optimization 📊, to improve their social media strategies and get back their customers or even find new ones.

Social media conversion rate

In this article, you will see.

What does 'conversion rate' mean in social media marketing?

Social media conversion rate refers to the percentage of a company's website or landing page visitors, who do any type of action in connection with the company's platforms. This means that anything can be a conversion, depending on business goals 🎯.

Including but not limited to, there are some examples for conversion in social media marketing:

  • Make an acquisition
  • Register on a website
  • Fill up a form or questionnaire
  • Download something
  • Sign up for a newsletter
  • Engagements (like returning visitors, lots of time spent on the site, etc...)

To make it more realistic I brought an example in connection with Instagram followers😄. Here are some alternatives to turn Instagram followers into paying customers 👇:

After reading through these examples it can be said that conversion rate is a measurable action when potential customers turn into paying customers 💰. It is important that only measuring these with different types of analytics is not enough. Companies also have to keep in mind the branding exercises they make on social media, when they determine their conversion in social media marketing. So the question is:

How to calculate social media conversion rate?

The mathematical formula is, as follows:

Social media conversion rate (%) = Conversions on social mediaTotal clicks (visitors) X 100

In addition to the formula, you can also see in steps, how we can get to the measurement 👇:

  • First of all, you have to create a post with a CTA (call-to-action) link hidden in it. To make it trackable you can use an URL shortener program.
  • Second, you need to place a “cookie” on the user's device. This attaches the lead to a campaign.
  • Third, track the total number of visitors, clicks, and conversions generated by the post.
  • Finally, use the formula and divide the previous amount by total clicks.

For calculating conversion in social media marketing it can be a good idea🌟, if you segment the types of metrics in groups, such as:

Sales: This means how much money you made from the content you posted 🤑. The measuring method for this is your offline sales activity or an eCommerce system. But obviously, you need to create CTAs as I mentioned before to make this process possible. When you raise the sales, you are improving ROI, which is really important for conversion in social media marketing.

👉 Shareability: means the likes, shares, and - in some cases - the received inbound links that your post generates.

Consumability: This takes a closer look at your activities. It measures how consumable your content was, for your customers. Was it easily understandable or were you able to convey the message you wanted with it? 🤔

Brand activities: These should also be taken into account. Brand image, logo design, and naming make a huge difference and influence conversion rates. For example, the number of Google searches or brand mentions (WOM) on social media platforms, or PR activities.

Lead generation: This measures whether your content consumed by your consumers created a lead or not because you can follow up on that.

Using these factors in your social media marketing strategy makes your conversion rate more accurate 😄🎯.

📚 To learn more about measuring performance, check our article Measuring performance in business: a step-by-step guide.

how to calculate social media conversion rate

Top tips for CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization)

  • Determine who your target market is, find what is important to them and what motivates them to act for you.
  • Research and tests are essentials in your social media content. For the best outcome these tools should be included in your campaign: CTAs, hashtags, post content, headline, visual parts... Here you can use the A/B testing method, with which you can compare one version against another to find out which are the best for your goals.
  • Create mobile phone optimized landing pages, because most people view social media on mobile devices.
  • Ask your followers to tag and share your posts, which establish a relationship with the consumer. For example, tagging a friend can be a good request because in this case, the goal is to tag a friend because users think that their friends will be interested in this topic too. When consumers trust your brand like this they will think they receive valuable content on your site, which can lead to loyalty. 🏅
  • Use headlines because these can grab attention 🎯. Mostly when they contain questions and odd numbers. Assaf Cohen, who runs gaming company Solitaire Bliss, suggests using image-based in headlines. “When we make a new game announcement on social media, we share headlines using eye-catching images. This has driven our conversion rate significantly higher because our headlines stand out.”
  • Make high-quality content with images, pay attention to a good UX.
  • Re-share successful posts but make it a bit different, like changing the picture in it.
  • Make it easy for your visitors to search things on your site. If your website is clear and not hard to navigate on 🚢, consumers will return and enjoy the time they spent there.
  • Track and search keywords, phrases for your content. (roofing SEO)
  • Use Squidvision to See How Much Revenue Every Button And Link On Your Website Generates to better optimize your site.

📚 Nurturing leads is essential to improve your conversion rate. To learn more check our article How to Nurture Sales Leads to Clients.

What is ROI?

After understanding how to calculate social media conversion rate, it’s important to understand ROI, which is different from simple profit - it is a calculation that is usually used to measure the financial and other return you will receive from the money and effort you are investing in 📈- it is the effectiveness of your potential investment.

How to calculate the ROI?

For improving ROI, calculating is esencial. The mathematical formula to calculate social media ROI:

Social media ROI (%) = Net income earned from the social media investment. Total cost of investment in social media marketing X 100

For a more practical approach here are the steps that you should follow 👇:

  1. Assign clear social media purposes: This helps you define your values and how actions are set with business and department goals. You need to focus on all of the audience you have.
  2. Set the right goals: Objectives locate your direction to go on, but goals determine how and when you will get there.
  3. Track the appropriate metrics: use vanity (like comment, share) metrics to measure the overall social ubiquity and gauge yourself against competitors. There are others that you can track such as sign-ups, site traffic, audience engagement, leads, revenue generated.
  4. Calculate your spendings: to understand the full investment. The key things here are the cost of tools and platforms, social ad budget, content creation, time spent by the social media team, and of course the agencies and consultants.
  5. ROI report: This has real value for your team and budget.

Just like Conversion Rate, ROI also has different aspects when it comes to measuring. Instead of only relying on financial metrics you should have a look at the money spent on organic and paid social media efforts 👀, or social media agencies, tools, etc...

For your returns - beyond direct selling - you should keep in mind 💭 these things as well:

Your employees can understand your company's culture better with social media marketing and this leads to increased employee engagement and trust 🏅.

Your campaigns affect the consumer's attitude towards your brand. If you do them in a good way, marketing can lead to improved brand consciousness, patronage, and word-of-mouth referrals. ''So follow social media trends in 2022 for winning and successful campaigns''.

📚 Understanding the mix of marketing and sales can help you to improve your conversion rate. To learn more, check our article How sales and marketing can work together – joining forces to boost results

Improving ROI

Useful tips for improve

Use a CRM tool

Anything related to business requires the right tools, and to improve your ROI, is not different. A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is perfect for improve ROI, because of the following features.

  • Manage visitors from different platforms, like Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Chat button, website form and so on.
  • Have intuitive dashboards with all the relevant metrics and datas.
  • Automate follow-up messages, really useful to make sales
  • Automate email marketing campaign for warm leads
  • Use tags to segment visitors, leads and clients for categories, like, for example, “Came from Facebook/Instagram/Site” or “Cold/Warm/Hot Lead”

If you want to improve your social media conversion rate, we really recommend you to use Kommo. With this software, you can manage visitors and leads who contact you from different social media, life forms on Facebook Ads, messages on Messenger, WhatsApp Button, Instagram, Facebook comments and much more, an easy way to manage customers and improve ROI and conversion rate.

If you want, you can try Kommo for free for 14 days.

Change the content type of your sales

Different studies among marketers showed that when they changed their sales content type into a video form, it helped them generate leads. This means that a well-produced brand video convinces people to buy the product more 🚀. So changing the sales content type you use in your sales funnel can make a huge difference to the ROI

Estimate your sales

Auditing your sales process from the beginning to the end is important because you can see where the problem is with your marketing strategy. There you should use a well-written call-to-action.

An easy start would be to monitor and track your business finances. You can use an automated expense management software to do all the heavy lifting while enjoying automated compliance, seamless expense management, and credit card reconciliations.

Reduce the unnecessary expenditures

If you take your time ⏳ to search for other options for a strategy or a problem you can find several better solutions, which save your money.

An easy start would be to monitor and track your business finances. You can use an automated expense management software to do all the heavy lifting while enjoying automated compliance, seamless expense management, and credit card reconciliations.

Increase incomes

If you can increase sales without increasing your costs 😄, or just enough to still provide a net gain in profits, you are improving ROI.

Re-evaluate waitings

Do not think that every investment you make has to provide a financial gain. But investments can bestow identifiable benefits. This means that sometimes you do not make a profit, but win loyalty which is almost equal to this.

Now, after you read through this article you have a better view of how to calculate social media conversion rate, ROI and their calculating methods. Using these strategies and tips will help you improve your marketing and speed up your growth in many areas.

🚀 Make a personal sale with Kommo

✅Kommo is a pioneering Messenger Based Sales CRM software that helps businesses achieve more sales and create long-lasting relationships with their customers. It is a tool that enables companies to reach better results and increase their profits.

Horvath Luca

Content Marketing Manager of Capturly, a full-scale online analytics tool that provides online businesses with real business insights simply and intelligibly.

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