Every day, I constantly put all my efforts on promoting personal Linkedin profiles, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest and Facebook of City Pass Guide, a Vietnam Travel information provider. There was once I felt interactions and engagements were useless as I never knew how they really support positively City Pass website in terms of commercializing it. I “struggle to quantify my efforts and demonstrate ROI” like Rebecca Murtagh shared on her articles about “5 steps to calculate social media ROI”.

And this is how she helps making my works easier:

1. Try to work out with your boss the KPIs

What I have done is so wrong as I was not actively mentioning any end goals in running social media campaigns. I should raise this up in my first date at work to understand what the managers really expected from social media investments? Therefore, in my social media plan in 2013, I have picked “traffic rates” as my end goal of this marketing initiative. In fact, you can have other options for KPIs such as purchases if your site is selling products or services, subscriber, demo requests, shares, downloads, or duration on the website. “Google Analytics Social Reports allow for KPIs to be reflected as Goals”, said Rebecca.

You can identify these goals by having Google Analytics points out URL destination, Visit Duration, Page/Visit. However, be aware that you will never determine exactly how valuable social is if you cannot give a value for each goal from the start.

2. Stop observing and mining, It’s time to using data to give your insights.

“Google Analytics uses website data to reveal Social Sources, identifying which social networks drive the most traffic, result in conversion and deliver the highest quality visitors.”, said Rebecca.

I usually started my talk with the terms of “in my opinion” or “from what I see” in conversations with my boss whenever trying to explain a phenomenon. Trust me, I frequently doubted what I had just spoken out after any discussion. I have not any figures to prove myself that I am explaining correctly.

Since using the visitor Flow report in Google Analytics, I was able to understand where the traffics come from, go to and opt out or drop offs. This insight can help marketers know how to improve their conversion path in order to reach targeted goals.

3. Get inspired to create the “King”

In the SEO world, everyone knows who their kings are. The point is how to create content that make Netizen into it. The Content tab in Google Analytics not only inspires you on creating related contents but also reveals the source of highest value visitors.

One of my interesting features from Google Analytics is the Social Plug-ins report. It tells you which posts have been shared from your site. This is the second-most-important feature (after the content report) to help you build community and share your contents organically.

Remember that: Google states ” Content that gets shared, wins.”

4. “Use Social sources to learn more about your audiences”, said by Rebecca

This is definitely true and will soon replace the traditional public relations when everyone goes online, works online and even eats online.

I really like this statement from Rebecca, “One of the most powerful aspects of social is the mere fact that behind every interaction is a human.” I am not sure if there is any school starting recruit students for their brand new major, the “Online Customer Behavior”course. Working in SEO for almost 18 months, I see the biggest challenge is to understand and predict what online users are going to do after visiting a website.

Thanks to new feature of Google – The social data hub, we are now able to know what activities are taking place relevant to our content, when, by whom, and how they help achieve goals.

“The social data hub will make it easier to aggregate social data that analytics users are looking for. It isn’t a product in and of itself, merely a standardized process to get data into GA. This will help marketers and publishers easily access and measure all social platforms and actions side by side.” by Jim Gianoglio.

Hang on ! Don’t be too excited to jump crazily on the ground. The social data hub does not include LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. It’s another further step to show that Google want to dominate online network by providing more GA features to help SEO and Marketers. In return, we must be on behalf of them to tell our clients: “Please open Google Plus account”