Without a clear strategy, even viral content can end up going nowhere.
Social media is essential for companies trying to connect with modern consumers. Without a clear purpose, however, the results aren’t likely to amount to anything more than noise.
For Patrick Pho, who leads the content studio at Volkswagen of America, businesses need a plan in place before posting content and diving into the comment section. They need to know what they want from their efforts and a way of presenting the outcome that’s easy for the leadership team to understand.
Below, Pho outlines three steps for making social media campaigns contribute to a company’s overall mission.
- Establish your business objective: Every company should decide what it’s trying to achieve by participating on various social platforms. Borrowing from the traditional sales funnel, Pho offers three categories for firms to consider when defining their goals:
- Exposure: This metric captures how many people are seeing your content. It’s raw impressions, which can help boost brand awareness.
- Consumption: This metric involves a bit more focus from the user. It documents how long someone is watching the video or looking at an image. It implies some degree of interest and curiosity.
- Engagement: This metric shows users are invested. They’re liking, commenting, sharing with friends or clicking on the link to find out more.
- Set a benchmark: It’s difficult to measure how far you’ve gone if you don’t know where you started. For gauging performance, Pho advises companies to use a historical benchmark. Volkswagen compiles the previous year’s data to identify the median number, which serves as a guide for how the automaker’s current content is doing. Separating the figures by platform and content type can produce a more accurate comparison when assessing a specific campaign’s level of success.
- Create a dashboard: Highlight the metrics that align with the company’s most pressing business needs. Remember: Less is more. Don’t feel a need to include every datapoint, as an abundance of bar charts and scatter plots can be both distracting and confusing. The point is to make it easy for anyone who opens the dashboard — whether it’s a teammate or an executive — to quickly understand whether the social content is accomplishing what it was designed to do.
Watch Pho’s full session, titled “Defining Social KPIs for Business Impact,” on Ragan Training.
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