You may even be surprised to find that actions you thought wouldn’t work have finally been the ones to which your target has responded most favorably. And the other way around. By analyzing the results of your actions you will be able to invest more time in thosesocial networks that work best for your business or in the type of content that yourtarget audience best consumes.
If you’ve come this far but haven’t started your Social Media Plan yet, you can read our previous articles on this Step-by-Step Guide:
- Social Media Plan step-by-step I. Situation analysis and objectives.
- Social Media Plan II. Budget and social media content plan.
Step 7. Measuring results. Selection of KPI’s.
KPI’s are performance indicators. Their acronym stands for Key Performance Indicator. They are the metrics that will help us to know the performance of our actions, in this case, of our social media plan.
The first step before measuring results will be to establish what our KPI’s will be, taking into account the objectives we set at the beginning of the social media plan.
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What can be our KPI’s? If one of our objectives was to increase by 20% the engagement in our Fan Page, for example, one of our KPI’s should be the number of interactions with our publications according to the number of followers. Of course, we must have a report before the start of the new campaign to be able to make the comparison.
Other examples of KPIs could be the number of likes our page receives, the number of followers or the conversions we have achieved from social networks. Look for your KPIs and go for your goals!
Although we include measurement in step number 7, you should keep in mind that social media campaigns are immediate. That is, we get measurable results instantly. That’s why we must review daily how our publications, ad campaigns (such as Facebook Ads, for example) and the performance of the different social networks are working. This way, you can make a change in your actions if necessary and not wait until the end of your campaigns.
It goes without saying that you must document all the data you have collected to be able to track your progress in the long term.
This is the great advantage of the immediacy of the online world. In addition to being able to work in a much more economical way our marketing strategies, we can make a change in our strategy in an almost immediate way.
In this step you may find useful our article on how to interpret the Facebook statistics. You can read it by clicking on this link ‘Do you analyze the metrics of your professional Facebook page?’
Step 8. Contingency plan.
What is a contingency plan? It is a hypothetical approach of how we would act in the face of different crisis situations. We can talk about an online reputation crisis (when we receive criticism through the networks) or simply a crisis against the objectives of our social media strategy.
- You are not achieving your objectives. You must have alternative actions in advance in case the planned ones do not work as expected. These can be actions with more momentum such as, for example, a Facebook contest. That’s why it’s important that you constantly analyze your social networks so that, when you think it’s necessary, you can immediately launch a complementary action to boost your results and achieve your goals.
- You’re getting negative feedback. Just as you should have an Online Reputation Crisis Management manual, you should also have a contingency plan to deal with negative comments that may come to you from your social networks. It is common to receive criticism, no one can please everyone and one of the advantages of the online world is that everyone can give their opinion freely and publicly. And, of course, this opinion can sometimes be negative. Keep an eye on all the interactions in your network and develop an emergency plan.
