After building social media assets and getting through some of the early pitfalls, clients often find a number of success stories in their efforts. And they want to do more. The challenge they face is that success in social media seems to be hit or miss, and there is no systematic way to guide activity and gauge success. When clients reach this point, we strongly recommend they build a “GamePlan” to provide a roadmap for social activity and set specific performance targets. This will allow for the creating of KPI that can be tracking over time, demonstrate success and get appropriate buy-in across the organization.

At this stage our clients are asking themselves:

• What are reasonable baseline metrics for social performance and how do we improve those metrics over time?
• What threshold changes in social media activity will mean that something important is occurring? More specifically, what increase in negative posts indicate a potential crisis, or what level do conversations need to increase before I am creating viral buzz?
• How do social media metrics compare to other business metrics we are currently tracking?

To learn more about what steps you should take and outcomes you can expect click the organization needs and see a sample objectives matrix we build for clients.