Measuring $ ROI on Facebook, Twitter, G+?

Discussions
#1

My main product, Poker Copilot, has its own Google+ page and Facebook page. I regularly (twice a month?) post updates, typically whenever I update our software. To date, I’ve found no compelling argument to create a Twitter account for our product.

For a few months last year, I paid Facebook to promote our Facebook page, and while that certainly added to the number of followers, I believe it didn’t result in even one sale. I say, “I believe” instead of “I know”, because I have not found a way to verify this.

I’ve just finished reading http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-social-media, which seems to implicitly consider success with social media to be “likes” and “+1s” and “followers”. But I measure success in net sales, improved productivity, and reduced costs.

I’ve never found a way to measure if our social media presence results in:
a) more sales; or
b) lower costs (due to improved support channels)

How I could test this with hard data? Have you managed to do so?

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#2

It’s funny as I don’t use Google+ nor Facebook for business, only twitter , but it’s a B2B so I’m not losing much.

I’ve just finished reading http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-social-media, which seems to implicitly consider success with social media to be “likes” and “+1s” and “followers”.

Yeah, I managed to get some followers very quick but 99% of them are spambots, marketers etc i.e everyone but people interested in my product. I strongly agree with you that success is measured in sales/revenue at least when talking about acquiring customers.

You can measure the result of the social media campaigns as long as you tag them (a specific code for each channel) then you can see how many users with a specific tag bought something. This requires your website to look for and store such tag (usually a query parameter). It’s possible that something like KissMetrics, Mixpanel to have tools for this and I’ve seen some options in Google Analytics too, but never used them yet.

#3

Google Analytics will tell you a lot about where you get the sales from in the Conversion tab, including which sales are from Facebook, Twitter,etc

If you are using Facebook ads you can track or even pay per conversion. I think your product will work very well on Facebook. You can bring tons of extra sales from there.

PS: I’ve been an affiliate marketer a few years ago and also made a saas to decrease the Facebook advertising costs by optimizing the image ads to get higher CTRs.

[Later edit]
Check this course from LeadPages about Facebook Ads https://lptraining.leadpages.net/facebookadvertising/

#4

Ya I’m on twitter quite a bit and have run some ads but have had quite a hard time correlating that to sales.

#5

Google+ has SEO benefits like instant Google indexing, so it’s worth posting content updates (e.g. new blog posts) there for that purpose alone.

Facebook has essentially become a pay-to-play channel. It’s said to be pretty cost effective given the many ad targeting criteria it offers, so I’d investigate that more than worry about page likes. Last year they added the ability to target by operating system.

Maybe Twitter would work if there’s an active community of poker players using it (I have no idea). Otherwise, I’d also consider it to be an ad channel with targeting purposes. Both Facebook and Twitter are likely to be considerably cheaper than Google Adwords.

#6

I also post links to my newsletters onto Google+ and Facebook. I have no real idea if this drives sales. But it only takes me 5 minutes per newsletter, so I think it would be crazy not to.

When I tried facebook ads (some years ago) my account was suspended after a few weeks because you weren’t allowed to advertise downloadable software (unless you were one of their favoured partners). Has that changed? Or is ‘promoting your facebook page’ treated differently to running an ad?

#7

Andy, it’s funny because a google query for “facebook advertising policy downloadable software” still returns your old post about this! I have no idea what their current policy might be in practice (vs. the policy “on paper”, as you well know these are two very different things). I’d venture that advertising one’s FB page - as opposed to linking to your website - would be likely to be a pure waste of money, unless you were running a native FB store.

The bigger picture is that Facebook is fast becoming a mobile company, so I’m not sure it’s really worth investigating its nooks and crannies to market desktop apps. But we’re drifting away from this thread’s original ROI tracking question.

#8

The right way to use Facebook ads if they don’t allow direct downloadable products is to:
1)Build a fan-base with facebook ads and an automated posting app where you include links to your product(still not sure about their policy)
2)Build an email list by offering something free(like poker ebook or something) and drip campaign to sell the product

Building an email list works for any type a product and facebook won’t ban anyone for offering a freepoker ebook. They ban accounts when they get reports about the ad, which won’t be the case if they get what they expected.

#9

This is probably a good time to repost this video, for those who have never seen it:

Facebook Fraud