Developing an effective customer-first social media strategy is achieved by:

• Pulling your data together to create a picture.
• Making observations about the picture.
• Drawing hypotheses or conclusions based on your observations.
• Setting actions which will help prove or disprove your hypotheses – your test plan.

This method of developing your test plan is built upon testing variables that will help you achieve your objectives by giving your audiences what they want.

You can use a template such as the one depicted in this step to record your social media results and identify common trends in your best, and worst, performing posts.

You will need to be able to turn this into truly actionable insights – as opposed to not mere measurements. It’s also important to communicate the highlights of your findings to those who don’t work with social media on a daily basis.

Remember that some colleagues may not have a thorough understanding of how social media marketing works or the significance of certain metrics.

We will guide you through a process for gathering your metrics and presenting them in a way which is simple to analyse. Next, we’ll show you how to create insights that will inform your next steps and decision-making.

Performance Against Objectives

The first and most important thing to monitor is how you are doing against your objectives. This will set the tone for the rest of the report.

Do you need big changes to your approach to reach your objectives? Or are you on track but need to monitor and tweak to ensure you stay on the right path?

There are two key ways to measure your targets: the individual months, and the accrued measure.

The accrued measure or ‘year to date’ (YTD) will tell you your overall performance. Be aware that there are always peaks and troughs in performance. Being below your objective for one month isn’t a problem if you’ve exceeded in previous months. Or, if you excel in one month, you may be taking the opportunity to make up for where you have fallen short in previous months.

You will see the top table focuses on your performance for the month you are reporting on, and the second table focuses on your YTD performance.

Your Task

What observations do you think certain brands or organisations have made about you and your media habits?