Sam Milbrath is a Hootsuite copywriter who specializes in Customer Programs Content. She has written an interesting article about the Return On Investment or RIO of social media.

What happens when your new boss asks you, “What’s the ROI of social” or “What’s our average revenue per click?”

This recently happened to Michael Landauer, the digital communities manager at The Dallas Morning News regional newspaper. His new boss comes from Nokia, where they track everything. “I realized I didn’t speak the same language as my boss and needed to quickly change that,” Landauer tells us. With a background in journalism, Landauer doesn’t have  formal training in marketing or business.

Serendipitously, Landauer received an email marketing the Advanced Social Media Strategy Certificate (ASMS) from Hootsuite and Syracuse University’s Newhouse School. “I enrolled in the ASMS certification and it showed me the way,” he says. “Everything I learned from the course, I shared with my team members. We’re not just journalists experimenting with social media anymore, we’re starting to really utilize it.”

Four years ago, Landauer joined the digital team at The Dallas Morning News to increase audience engagement on their website, and manage reader comments and blog content. As almost an afterthought, he was asked to take at look at their social media presence. “We had 170 accounts—it was like anybody who ever had a thought created a social media profile as a way to share it,” he explains. “Cleaning up our social was the first step in learning on the job.”

How to create a social customer service workflow

Landauer’s CEO shared an article with him that reported 83 percent of brands don’t answer their customers on social media.

How to track and improve average cost-per-click

His team now has to meet aggressive goals for monetizing social media, which includes the crafting and tracking of sponsored posts. ASMS taught him how to create an ongoing targeted experiment on Facebook.

 The importance of tracking your competition

Landauer has also started tracking what their competition is doing. Through social listening, he noticed that some local TV and radio stations did a better job than The Dallas Morning News at marketing their flagship handles. Based on his learnings, he decided to embed their main social profiles in a prominent “share bar” on their website and ask journalists to share main handles more often.

Learning No. 5: How often to post on social

Through competitive listening, Landauer noticed that many competitors were posting more content, more often—and seeing success through higher engagement. This knowledge drove him to greatly increase how much they were posting.

You can learn more here.