7 steps to ensure perfect measurement of your social media’s health – Part I

Having options does not and should not either end in implementation exclusively. When it comes to your social media campaign, it can quite easily be measured with the different indicators available, for an example: reach, voice, comments or retweets.  But, if you don’t have a clear objective, the chances of your success are unlikely. Having a social media policy only, does not guarantee success, but gauging it continuously to check whether the correct path is taken or not, leads to success.

Now, if you have understood the difference between monitoring and measuring, try to ensure taking the best possible strategy to success. This will ensure that along with your business’s social media health, other online activities will be benefited as well. Make sure, to take the best steps to ensure that:

A Goal is required

Without a definite goal, it is impossible to achieve success. It is important to understand what you are doing and the reason behind doing so. Before engaging into social media have a plan. Therefore, the metrics you use to measure your social media campaign will vary along with the objective you take:

• If you want to drive awareness about your product, metrics like voice, readership and the engagement of readers is very important.
• If you are looking to increase the satisfaction level among the customers, some metrics like sentiment of customers, success rate of resolving customer needs, the time taken to resolve the query or satisfaction percentage shown in the customer surveys are important.
• If your intention is to create better products through your social media measurement campaign, then depend on the surveys of other competitive products. Measuring the current market trends is also important.
• If you want to develop customer advocacy, then have a look at your advocates. Check on their influence on customers and also their reach. It is also important to know how much they know about your product or business.

For your business, your goal may not match any of the aforementioned conditions. So, make sure to manipulate your goal accordingly.

All your Departments should be on the same page

For a successful social media campaign, co-ordination among different departments is necessary. Otherwise, it will not be possible for them to work together ensuring a common goal.

Now, how you make them co-ordinate is an issue. E-mails are not that useful in this case, rather you may create charts, graphs or a common dashboard which can be accessed by all the concerning departments. Ensure that meetings are being held between those departments on constant basis so that they are updated about each other. For an example, the department finding the latest news relating your business should be in touch with the department taking care of your tweets. Otherwise, same news may be repeatedly tweeted or you may miss some as well.

Context should be considered

It is absolutely meaningless to have a goal that is without context. Suppose, for your business, the social media conversation share is around 35%, that means your campaign is in good health.

So, if the results are good, then the plan taken is correct. Otherwise, you will need to reconsider your approach.

Out of the 7 essential steps, the 3 to start your social media campaign measurement is discussed here. The next article will make you aware of the next essential steps.