Is it possible to accurately track Social Media ROI?

ROI (Return on Investment) speaks to businesses. They especially speak to managers and CEOs who want to see what exactly is this doing for our company. Social media is known for being difficult to track its ROI. This difficulty is partly to blame on why businesses are hesitant to have social media marketing campaigns. Why plan a campaign if you can't measure its effectiveness? It is a valid concern. However, just because social media's ROI isn't 100% accurate, it is still an important way to communicate to customers today and should not be ignored. If a business ignores a social media campaign due to its lack of ROI then it will be very behind in the future. There are actually 5 effective ways businesses can track the ROI from social media. The first way is to have social media specific coupons and offers. If the coupon is only offered to Facebook, then you can easily track and see how many customers redeem that coupon. For example, Yoforia can offer a coupon for $4 yogurt just to their Facebook fans. They have 1,000 fans redeem the coupon but only about 150 of those actually used the coupon at a store. The second way to measure ROI is call tracking phone numbers. The idea is to provide a unique identifier to social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, to learn which social media platform drives the most leads and conversations. The third way to track social media ROI is to implement a conversation measurement. This allows advertisers track the behavior of people who click through an ad. You would be able to tell if a customer clicks and then goes on your site to register, then you have proof that the ad was at least effective for that. The ideal end result is that the customer clicks through an ad and buys a product on your website. The fourth way to track social media ROI is Google Analytics. Google Analytics will tell you how much traffic your social media websites gets. It won't tell you who is visiting but it can tell you an effectiveness of campaigns. For example, if you run a new ad and you're Facebook page gets more traffic than usual then you will get an idea that the ad has at least gotten you more visitors on Facebook.The last way to measure ROI is look at overall results and work backwards. For example, if Publix ran a social media campaign on a special sale of chocolate for Valentine's Day and based on last years numbers with no social media campaign, the sales for this years chocolates on Valentine's Day doubled. This is a clear cut way to look at it. However, this does not put the economy, weather, and other various factors into play. Hence, some of these ways to measure ROI does not provide a 100% accurate answer. Actually based on a way to measure your social media ROI, you might get different answers. I think as social media campaigns mature and start to develop as a more mainstream way to do advertising then more accurate ROI measurements will evolve. 

source - http://mashable.com/2013/02/13/roi-social-media/