Scaling and measuring social media success

KAIZEN

Reporting on incremental improvements to your marketing and focusing on Kaizen, or continuous improvement, should be top of mind for marketers.

Recently I discussed measuring the right thing and establishing KPIs for your digital marketing. Having a clear idea of success and to what degree you have accomplished it will drive you forward. But it is also prudent to review your measurements and their relevance to your business goals regularly.

With a large organisation that has multiple locals, regions and even countries to cover establishing core metrics becomes paramount to quantify improvements. Setting up a central pool of best practice and a guide to your channels is the best way to ensure consistency in the way you measure success. Social media measurement is no exception and it can also ensure you’re prepared for the best and worst case scenarios.

Here are some points you may wish to include in your best practice lists to ensure you’re comparing apples with apples or manzana or Я́блоко. Cross platform, cross country comparisons are possible with the right processes in place. I’ve also included some items to promote brand consistency, legal, security and crisis management.

• Google Analytics campaign codes and syntax for country or campaign specific tracking for each social network. Or equivalent for your website analytics tool.
• Preferred posting tool – Hootsuite, Cotweet, Sprout social, Buddy media etc.
  • Define reporting templates.
  • Delegate access through a master account for security.
• URL shortener if different from above.
• Preferred monitoring/listening tool and defined reporting templates.
• Promoted posts protocol.
• Tone and style guides for imagery, videos and text.
• Social visual brand guidelines.
• Templates for infographics.
• Video intro and outro snippets.
• Developers notes for meta data (Twitter cards, preview thumbnails etc).
• Preferred social sharing buttons and provider.
• PR and social media crisis protocol, plan and contacts.
• Copyright and licensing database for third part content.
• Contracts, admin accounts and account managers list for all tools.
• Additional employment contract amendments for social media.
• Social Media Strategy summary.
• Training documents, budgets and contacts.
• CONTENT calendar and schedule.

Like your KPIs, these best practice documents should be revisited regularly. In a learning organisation they could even be collaborative documents with comments areas to record what works regionally. Any adjustments should be trialled, a/b tested and asserted as the new best practice.

Let me know what I’ve missed in the comments!