By now, pretty much everyone has heard about the power of social media and the effect it can have on businesses that are leveraging it to enhance their bottom line. What may or may not be known—even by the businesses that are using social media to their advantage—are the actual numbers that are churning behind the scenes of specific social campaigns. So how can companies get to the nitty-gritty and really know how hard their campaigns are working for them?

Measuring Your Social Media ROI

A common misconception among business professionals seems to be that it’s impossible to measure the return on investment when it comes to social media, but that’s simply not the case. While it is a task that takes diligence and the right technology, it is most definitely possible—and necessary for those who want to be the most successful—to measure the success of online marketing campaigns.

Consider the companies that use roadside billboards for advertising. The billboards are huge and may (or may not) catch the attention of drivers who pass by. The problem is that marketers have no way of measuring who has seen their messages and who simply drove by without noticing a thing. That is essentially what marketers are doing if they post information online without following up by studying the analytics and discovering the actual return on investment.

A great example of recent success with social media marketing happened with the Kansas City area’s largest and most prominent Ford dealership, Gary Crossley Ford. This dealership hosts a dog adoption event annually, but this year the event had quite a different turnout than in years past. Why? It can all be attributed to the fact that this year the dealership took a completely different tack, and instead of pouring thousands of dollars into a traditional marketing campaign, they chose to strategically post their event using social media marketing. The results were nothing less than astounding.

In addition to a full house—a much larger turnout than previous years—the dealership celebrated finding homes for every dog that attended the event and having onsite veterinary professionals who microchipped 70 pets at no charge to the owners. The dealership was able to quantitatively measure attendance and reaction to this event on their FuzeCast dashboard, advanced technology designed to offer analytics, professionally curated and custom content, and improve employee engagement and advocacy—all in one easy-to-use tool. Simply stated, Gary Crossley Ford was able to watch the success happening in real time as the numbers increased on their analytics dashboard.

How Did It Work?

It may sound like a small neighborhood event, so how did the dealership manage to get such a great turnout for a pet adoption? With the help of the FuzeCast app, Gary Crossley Ford was able to encourage employees to post the event to their social media pages with one easy click. Not only did their employees share the event with their friends on social media, but those friends in turn went on to share it with even more people. The cycle of online sharing continued until the post had reached over 5,000 likes and had been shared on personal Facebook pages over 200 times. That is the power of social media marketing at work!

This event alone ended in a viral effect that goes to show that it doesn’t necessarily take big marketing dollars and a traditional approach in order to accomplish a great return on your investment. When businesses focus on creating messages that are tailored to their consumers, the high-impact, lower-dollar approach of social media marketing will effectively tap into a consumer market that has a propensity to engage and interact.