Using social media to increase your business or website’s exposure is increasingly becoming both a mainstay and an affordable solution in the online world. While there are many experts who take opposing views on whether or not social media can actually generate a return on investment, many agree that targeted exposure is never bad for business – assuming your marketing is well-developed and adequately presented. For those wishing to monitor the number of clicks, conversions, likes, retweets and any other metrics by which many experts measure social media profitability, this article will help point you in the right direction.

Actionly

Offering a premium yet affordable solution for monitoring return on investment, Actionly is pinging a website or social media’s metrics to display them in a very customizable, yet easy-to-digest fashion. Through this, you can view what others are saying about your business or website across all of your social media hubs, while also keeping track of search buzz for your selected products, services or search queries. Clicks, likes, retweets and visits are all also easily displayed in spreadsheet form and can be downloaded at will. Actionly’s services cost $20 per month for an individual plan and $50 per month for a business plan.

KISSmetrics

This company is a very popular solution and was at the forefront of providing a solid option for monitoring ROI via social media. Offering a 14-day free trial, KISSmetrics allows you to monitor every single interaction a user has with your brand – whether it be on your website or via social media. The code can be injected into various languages for monitoring, including SQL, PHP, Ruby, Python, Java and many more. Revenue is displayed in clear form in the user interface, along with all key metrics needed to determine your success rate. KISSmetrics is probably out of reach of budding entrepreneurs, with the most affordable plan costing $99 per month.

Adobe Marketing Cloud

For the high-end option, we have Adobe Marketing Cloud (more specifically, Adobe Social), which is the end-all, be-all monitoring for return on investment via social media. You will have to contact Adobe personally to obtain a quote, but the general consensus is that social media monitoring by Adobe will cost around $3000 per month – a staggering sum for virtually anyone who is running a small business or series of websites. Still, many highly satisfied customers have bragged about the effectiveness of this platform and the added benefits the price tag brings.

Do It Yourself

If all of these options seem either too pricey or you are just starting out and do not have much revenue to spare, then there is no reason why all of this information cannot be gathered manually and compiled into a bigger picture. By using individual metrics easily obtained from each social network, analytics installed to always be pinging your website statistics and manually keeping tabs on trending searches, you can create a similar picture that will help you monitor your progress until you are able to afford a better, more automatic solution for monitoring ROI.