Most businesses use social media to create solid brand awareness. To be exact, Forbes lists “brand recognition” as the top advantage of social media marketing.

The top 3 goals of digital and social media marketing this year will be increasing brand awareness, website traffic, and reach are reportedly the bottom line business goals of generating leads and driving revenue for top companies.

The biggest challenges for companies suggest that they are not getting the desired results. In fact, most business owners will tell you that measuring ROI is their greatest challenge. The hardest part for most of these owners is trying to make sense of it all.

The leading challenge arises because the understanding between brand awareness and bottom-line results is often secondary, with no clear line in marketing or sales funnel.

Because the value of your social presence can be ambiguous, define your value of social media ‘ROI’ specific to your company and industry. What does this look like?

It could be a Twitter follower clicking through to your website to download an eBook.

It could be a special landing page your company only uses for Facebook to gather email addresses

The information can be mapped to long-term social media marketing success, and each click could be given a theoretical dollar amount. If analytics show:

1 in 500 click-through rate from Twitter amounts to a whitepaper download

1 in 10 whitepaper downloads leads to $1,000 in sales inside of a quarter

Twitter clicks can be assessed as worth 20 cents

These types of custom conversion values depend on your company’s community size, service costs, and expenditures used in marketing, but will help to give you an idea of cash value and ROI for your social marketing effects.