Social Arithmetic: 5 Steps to Optimize Social Media Marketing
The following is an excerpt from the DirectMarketingIQ report, Secrets of Direct Marketing Arithmetic (2nd edition).
The challenge for marketers trying to get a handle on social media marketing performance today is to understand what information is crucial to catch and distill in order to gain a thorough understanding of the ongoing performance, and ultimately the effectiveness, of activation programs. The following framework for establishing an effective social media marketing performance measurement program should give you a good start towards better interpreting and optimizing the performance of your activation programs.
The ideal approach to social media marketing performance assessment can be summarized in the following five steps:
- Establish baselines for KPIs: including current reach, share of voice and sentiment numbers.
- Standardize presentation of results: Determine which tools you’ll use for effective mining, analysis, visualization and reporting of results.
- Determine sampling/reporting frequency: Consider that different teams require differing views at different intervals.
- Raw insights at key intervals: distillation of actionable insights at key periods post-campaign, or after some trends emerge.
- Share insights across teams: Before your next program briefing, ensure strategy, planning and creative resources are making decisions based on what’s been learned.
With a social media marketing performance assessment program in place at the start, you will be able to respond to, react to or simply manage the sometimes rapidly shifting online sentiment and its identifying behavior, even among your biggest advocates.
Luis Hernandez is senior vice president and director of marketing technology for Wunderman’s New York office.
