Marketing professionals are forever grappling with the twin issue of quantifying social media value and how to make the best use of it in terms of ROI. To make this a little simple here is a short guide how you can map social media strategy and assign meaningful key performance indicators so that your business goals can be measured.
The reason why putting a value to social media is difficult is because business objectives are generally unclear and the metrics used to quantify them are numerous. It is advised that you first define your business objective and then get into the business of devising the best strategies for achieving those objectives.
Social media started out as fun thing and hence almost everyone began using it. It was only later that people realized the true potential and began trying to harness this potential for business. Here is how you should go about it.
The first step is to clearly define your Scope, Mission, Goals, and Tactics. Having defined these four important things the next step would be strategic planning to achieve success.
Select a function of your business and assign a goal to it. Then define the social media that you want to use to achieve your goals. Assign goals to this social media. Clearly indicate the key performance indicators for each goal. Choose the tactics you feel that would work to achieve each goal. And lastly define metrics to measure the success of your tactics.
Please note that each function or department will have different KPIs. For example marketing department goals will have different KPIs from the production department goals.
Define your mission. For example your mission could be “Triple the production without increasing manpower costs”, or “Achieve three times the sales in the next financial year”, and so on.
The next step is to zero in on the key performance indicators for the goals you have set. The performance indicators will remain constant even if you have to change your tactics. This will happen as social media changes rapidly and you will have to change your tactics many times over the course of your mission. However, your performance indicators have to be specific, attainable, measurable, time bound, and most importantly relevant.
Now choose the tactics for achieving your goal. For this you will have to relook at all the social media platforms and select the one best suited to achieve your goals.
The last step would be to define the metric for measuring the success of your tactic. This will require constant monitoring, brainstorming, fine tuning, and in some cases changing. This is an important exercise as all your future KPIs will crystallize from this exercise.