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Defining and Setting Success Metrics:

We should know what to measure and when to measure. This is the area where businesses- without proper guidance, or internal knowledge – start seeing hazy returns. Metrics is the area where most organisations or marketing teams don’t see recognizable returns or returns that are hard to quantify for social media campaigns. Choosing the right success metrics is the first challenge of implementing a social media campaign you can measure.

Figuring out what success metrics translate easily into a business context for your organisation is what matters.

The number of followers on your twitter account is a pretty meaningless success metric to use, although it might be satisfying and flattering to try to increase. However, if for example you are a chocolate shop owner in South Mumbai and you implement a social media campaign to get 100 female followers on Twitter who live in South Mumbai – that’s a metric that translates into a business context. These 100 qualified leads you can offer Valentine’s day discounts to in the week before February 14th. 100 leads to remind that it’s Mother’s day soon. Aiming for 10,000 random followers from all over the world might be a nicer number to look at, but being stricter with your success metrics and choosing a more miniscule goal will make the relationship between the outcome of the campaign and your bottom line easier to understand. 100 qualified leads are undeniably good. 10,000 people who know the name of your shop but can’t ever buy anything from it.

The next question is then to know what should success metrics be? And there is no short answer to that. This is where your marketing team or social media consultant comes in to help you define what things you should be measuring. It depends on various factors such as what tools you have available to you, what are the goals of your campaign etc. One thing to remember is that by defining success metrics you can break down qualitative attributes into metrics that are easier to understand and measure. For example your campaign goal could be to increase “Influence” and you might measure this by the number of influential blogs linking to you and the number of influential twitters retweeting you, to give two simple ideas for metrics.

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