Social Media Strategies: How to Define Interim Measures

I include interim measures in my social media strategies, as shown in my post “What Does a Social Media Strategy Look Like.” The interim measures are specific data that you gather and evaluate in order to determine if your social media strategy is on track. Checking data at regular intervals will show you trends and allow you to make adjustments to your strategy as you implement it. Here are guidelines for determining interim measures.

Define interim measures for each goal

Define interim measures for each goal in your social media strategy. Goals should be specific and discrete. Creating measures for each goal will allow you to cover all the important elements of your plan so you can monitor them on an ongoing basis.

Add measures for tactics, as well

Review the tactical plan and be certain you’ve covered interim measures for tactical steps, where appropriate. This ensures that you really have interim measures.  For example, if a tactical step is to acquire new Twitter followers through existing followers, you might define interim measures to try to determine if that is happening.

Include specific instructions and timeframes

For interim measures, define what data you are going to capture, how you are going to capture it (if possible), and how you will analyze it. For example, if you want to measure how you are doing on acquiring new Twitter followers from existing ones, your measure might read:

On a weekly basis, measure @’s and other mentions of our account, plus the number of new followers gained that week. Monthly, look for trends to find correlations between the number of mentions and follower gain. After three months, use the data to estimate the acquisition rate through existing followers.

Being specific helps you define when different measurement tasks need to occur, define the time investment required, and will help you determine tools and processes for the organization.

Provide alternative methods

Social Media is still in its infancy, so there are surprisingly few tools to do the kinds of analysis you are likely to want.  For that reason, I often include two or more methods of doing the interim measures. Generally, there’s a straightforward tradeoff between effort and accuracy. One method will take less time, but be less accurate. For example:

• Low-cost method: On a weekly basis, measure @’s and other mentions of our account, plus the number of new followers gained that week. Monthly, look for trends to find correlations between the number of mentions and follower gain. After three months, use the data to estimate the acquisition rate through existing followers.

• High-cost method: On a weekly basis, track @’s and mentions by existing followers of our account, including the date they occurred. On a daily basis, track new followers of our account, including the date they became followers and who they were following at that time.  Monthly, compile a list of the new followers who were following one of our existing followers upon acquisition, and where the existing follower mentioned us within two days of the new follower joining. Count these as follower acquisition via an existing follower. (Using this method, we could also do a deeper analysis to determine which of our followers is most influential in helping to acquire new followers.)

The high-cost method is more accurate and provides information that could be helpful in other ways. However, there are probably no tools to do this kind of measurement specifically, so the client would have to allocate time to collect this data manually every day. Providing two alternatives gives the client the option of deciding whether the value of the data is worth the resource committment. 

Use interim measures to drive deeper analysis and tactics

As you can see from the last bullet, defining interim measures has a way of uncovering additional tactics and analysis. I’ve found that defining interim measures often leads me to see ways of using data to refine the social media approach. For example, if you’re already gathering information about the clicks on links in your posts and the number of comments, likes, and shares of those links, it doesn’t take much more to categorize the links and determine which types of links garner the greatest engagement.

These guidelines should help you develop interim measures for your social media strategy.  Have I missed anything? Do you have other guidelines for interim measures? What interim measures do you use?