Starting your social media strategy with a focus on objectives is a sound way to begin the journey and ground your social business program.

Establishing a framework and gathering historical data to benchmark against will assist your organization to evolve as you learn. It is critical to capture and provide reporting across activities, channels and devices to inform future actions based on data. The ability to collect the data and assess the change over time (daily, weekly, monthly, annually) will be invaluable to your organization. 

Focusing on areas like the following will assist to develop your social business program and measurement discipline:

• Creating and refining the metrics/KPIs for your objectives

• Listening (where your customers are interacting with you)

• Socially participating and contributing to inform and transform the customer experience

• Engaging, influencing and advocating to evolve customer relationships

 Definitions: Social Media Strategy and ROI

Social media strategy is the deployment and development of modern strategic plans for social media. A social media strategy incorporates these new ways of communication where media is not only broadcast but also shared, commented, opined, edited or modified by the public at large. (Wikipedia)

Social media ROI is defined as a measure of the efficiency of a social media marketing campaign. Social media return is the value that you derive from social media based on the goals of your campaign. Social media ROI = (SM return – SM investment) / SM investment %. (Social Media Examiner)

Statistics

• 45% of CMOs are confident “that they know which metrics or business outcomes their key stakeholders care about.” (MarketingCharts)

• 35% of B2B marketing executives say they can calculate the ROI of their marketing spend most or all of the time. 42% say they can calculate ROI only some of the time, rarely or not at all. (B2B Marketing)

• 83% of B2B marketers invest in social media to increase brand exposure; 69% to increase web traffic; and 65% to gain market insights. (Social Media Today)

Insights

Establish and document your social media objectives first. 

Create metrics and define systems of measurement that will be used to capture the data.

Focus on tracking activities and campaign or event analytics with a clear beginning and end.

Continuously monitor, report and evolve your social media measurement and approach.