Comet Branding - Branding | PR | Social Media

Tune-up or Trade-in? How to tell if your social media approach is a lemon.

How can you tell if your social media strategy or partner (or both) is nothing but a lemon?  Use the 9-point Social Media Inspection scorecard to help you determine whether your social media approach simply needs a tune-up, or whether it’s time to trade in for a high-performance model.

Be your own social media mechanic by performing the following 9-point Social Media Inspection.

Go through the following performance categories, containing multiple questions each, answering the 24 questions as you go.

Assign 2 points for each YES response, 0 points for each NO, and 0 points for each I DON’T KNOW. (Seriously, folks. If you don’t know the answer, either you should know (0 points for you) or your partners should be telling you (0 points for them).)

1. MEASUREMENT:

Are you measuring expected business outcomes of your social media activity?

Are you comparing measurements to a pre-activity baseline and/or to trends over time?

Are you measuring the right behaviors in order to determine success? (For example, number of Twitter followers may grow over time, but if they are the right followers, larger numbers should result in more website visits and more visitors submitting requests for information. Growth in followers alone isn’t an indication of success; increased website traffic and inquiries from your target audience might be.)

2. TRAFFIC STRATEGY:

Do you have one?

Are your social media activities driving traffic in the right direction?

Have you established a primary destination for your social media-driven traffic (that is optimized to convert traffic into action)? All of your social media activity should create a flow of activity toward a desired outcome, whether that is a customer inquiry, a comment, a phone call or a purchase.  If not, map out what is happening and get back on track by redirecting traffic through better platform interconnectivity and definition of the specific roles of each account in the overall strategy.

3. ENGAGEMENT:

Have you defined what engagement should look like for your company/brand?

When you post a blog post, a video or send a tweet, does anyone respond, retweet, comment, click on your links, etc.?

Is the ratio of response to non-response to your posts increasing over time?

4. CONTENT:

Are you creating social media-specific content in the form of blog posts, videos, images, polls, contests, promotions, etc. that is NOT created originally for another purpose, reused without changes?

Is your content creation driven by a strategy that supports your business goals? Is your content distribution (dates, timing) directly correlated to increases in traffic and inquiries on your website (or blog)?

5. INTEGRATION:

Are your social media accounts interlinked to each other and to/from your public-facing website?

Do your other communication efforts include ways to participate in social media-based activities and vice-versa?

6. VOICE:

Do your social media activities accurately reflect your brand’s lingo?

Is your social media voice appropriate for your audience?

7. INFLUENCE:

Is your social media approach contributing to and/or leading the conversations in your industry?

Have you built brand and professional credibility through your various social media accounts?

Are you seeing improvements in your search engine rankings?

8. CONVERSION:

Are you experiencing a measurable increase in business due to your social media efforts?

Are you successfully converting increased website traffic and/or inquiries into more opportunities? (If you are unsure of the answer, refer to #1 above and your answer here is probably NO)

Have members of your organization that were not initially involved in social media activities begun requesting social media coverage of their product/service offering?

9. EVOLUTION:

Have you changed your approach over time, in response to target audience results and feedback?

Have you phased in or out any of your initial social media platforms as a result of new opportunities?

Has your overall marketing/communications spend shifted toward or away from one category of activity or another as a result of your social media activity?

Now add up all of your points and see where you end up:

36 to 48 points = Things appear to be running pretty smoothly. Keep up with your oil changes and rotate the tires and you’ll cruise along nicely. Keep an eye on your fuel gauge and don’t forget to top off your fluids if they get low. This baby just might get you somewhere.

20 to 34 points = You’re on the road but you’re not in the fast lane yet. Consider a tune-up or maybe a second opinion from another mechanic. You’re missing the on-ramps, need a newer GPS model and your fuel efficiency isn’t quite up to snuff.

0 to 18 points = You may have bought a lemon. A fresh paint job and some new rims might spruce it up, but this engine isn’t built for performance. If you have somewhere to be, you should call a cab, then start shopping around for a new(er), more fuel efficient model before this one kicks the bucket completely. Or spontaneously combusts.

What categories or questions would you add to this list? Any learnings or successes that would make this inspection more powerful?

Tags: content strategy, social media checklist, social media conversion, social media lemon, social media measurement, Social Media strategy, social media traffic, social media tune-up, social platform integration