How to Create a Social Media Success Formula

It’s unquestionable that increasingly many companies are investing heavily in social media activities. Big brands launch huge campaigns with influencers and other creative people, and small businesses need to find a way to identify and reach their ideal customers in the social web. These activities need to be measured – also unquestionable. At quintly, we do not believe in a one-size-fits-all approach. That’s why we introduced the “Social Media Success Formula” a while back.

The following post will guide you through the process of how to create this simple formula to measure your success with one number. With quintly, it is possible to create your own custom metrics, and I want to showcase how to use a customized goal tracking approach. 

The number the metric visualizes in the end shows to what percent of your goals you have already reached. This can and should be used for reporting to your team, your upper management or your client. Also, we see big companies benchmarking different branches with each other  to see which of them leads the game in regards to reaching the previously defined goals.

The following process will help you to have a clear structure on how to set up the Success Formula quick and easy. 

1) Social Media Audit

The first and perhaps most important part is the social media audit. Here you try to dig deeper on how your posts performed in the past. In other words: You try to understand what worked and what did not.

After this step you should know what your average “Facebook Reach” was, how high your interactions were, so on and so forth. This will set the basis for the next step of the process. 

2) Understand data and define success

Now you need to understand what you see and define success for your brand or your project personally. Answer the questions:

• Where do I want to get better in the next quarter?
• What are the most important factors? Fan Growth? Higher interactions on posts? A faster response rate?  

If you have found an answer to these questions, decide on the KPIs that can measure exactly that.

Here you will find a table that gives you an idea of social media KPIs that might be a good fit.

3) Building the Formula

With the first two steps you set the foundation for building the actual formula. This is how it looks and you just need to fill in you goals.

Note: Remember from Marketing class, goals should always be SMART. 

Legend: S stands for success and Facebook just tells that this formula is Facebook-specific. The factors 0.2, 0.3 and 0.5 indicate the weight of the KPIs and need to sum up to 1.

Visualization of the Social Media Success Formula

You can work with the formula in an Excel sheet and include it in your social media reporting. Much more convenient and easier to understand would be a visualization within quintly. We always strived to be as customizable as possible and this is a great use case for exactly this.

You are able to build this in quintly and add to your dashboard and reporting. For creating that on your own you would need to understand SQLite. But please don’t worry if you do not!

Once you decided on weights and factors that need to be taken into account, we can help you to create the formula.

Just reach out to our Customer Success Team. They are happy to work with you in order to understand your goals and have them turned into a clear, informational metric.

And, tadaa! this it how it would look in our tool. A lot of big clients have this metric in place already and we can help you setting up yours.  

A lot of big clients have this metric in place already if you think it's insightful for you daily business as well, please reach out to us! We can make that happen – together!

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