Let’s move on from saying we need objectives, benchmarks and KPI’s for social media activity – the reality is we know this has to happen and hopefully, by now, our clients understand this too. We also know that to get to a realistic and actionable benchmark, we should have been measuring the activity we have been running, what’s worked, what hasn’t – what got our audience really excited and what was ignored. The truth is we have the technology to do this (time to get down and dirty with analytics –eek!) and if we really delve deep enough we should be able to come up with the goods based on organised thinking and not fluffy assumptions.

The real challenge is getting those initial projections over to a client before any of the activity has kicked off. You need sign off – they need reassurance that the campaign will deliver. This is where expectations need to be managed and clients need to be aware that there are not necessarily certified metrics in place but informed decisions made on what can be achieved (and this doesn’t mean figures plucked from thin air). These initial benchmarks are of course work in progress and once monitoring and measurement kicks in then the figures become based on actual results.

So what information should we be privy to make those initial projections:

• The objective for social media activity (awareness, downloads, sales, donations…)
• Current popularity of Facebook page/Twitter feed – how many people could see your messages? (number of fans, level of interactivity)
• What other channels do you have to push your messages online (You Tube, Vimeo, Flickr, company blog) and how popular are they? (subscribers)
• Current website traffic and number of click throughs (analytics)
• Other marketing activity and budgets behind these tactics (advertising, PR, events, DM)
• Media plans – particularly where digital ads are appearing and where they are driving traffic to

So okay, it’s an ideal scenario to actually get all this info before a campaign starts, but if the point is integration and we are being tasked with delivering finite numbers then we have to have the rationale to back those numbers up. There is never going to be an flawless solution until you have a backlog of trialled and tested activity for the client in question (and of course this can only really act as a guide) but with smarter thinking and transparency on all aspects of a campaign then initial benchmarks can be developed that all parties should be happy with = sign off!