If you maintain a presence on social media, then you know how tricky it can be to assign a value to your efforts. Do more likes on Facebook necessarily translate to higher sales? While answering such questions may not always be simple or straightforward, a social media marketing service can put a proper strategy in place to help quantify the worth of social media campaigns to ensure they are a worthy investment.

According to this Search Engine Watch article, a good place to start is to ensure that social media initiatives tightly align with business goals. Too often companies dive in to what they’re going to do without first fully considering what it is they’re trying to accomplish. In fact, eMarketer Report reveals that as many as 4 of every 5 marketers focus on tactics before examining actual goals. A social media marketing service can help you avoid this mistake.

A social media marketing service can also aid your company in mapping out a workable plan that addresses the key issues of 1) why you’re using social media in the first place, 2) what you hope to gain by it, and 3) how you will meet your set objectives.

It’s important to initially define the scope of your social media campaign. Will it be used for sales, promotions, customer care, IT, research, or something else? Every department has different goals that will dictate how the medium is to be used. Each departmental initiative should be incorporated into the final strategic plan.

Ask yourself, what do we want to ultimately gain? Determine your overall purpose and what you hope to accomplish. A good rule of thumb is to set between 4-8 goals that you’d like the campaign to help you achieve. A social media marketing service can aid in setting workable goals, which should take into consideration internal workflow, customer and financial issues, and opportunities for growth.

Finally, it’s important to set tactics for how goals will be achieved and decide what metrics will be used to gauge the success of individual tactics. Need some advice from a social media marketing service that’s been-there-done-that? Give us a call.