“How is social media going to drive results for this project?”

All social media managers have a (*wink*) magic keyboard button that gives the answer to this question. It’s next to the “create a viral video” key.

Joking aside, this might be the most frequent, and frustrating, question that social media practitioners hear. I recently attended a social media conference with 400 other social folks from big brands, and this is the one area where everyone had a gripe, and an opinion.

There are two answers to this question to help you work your social media mojo. What makes these questions magic? They are answers in the form of questions.

Magic Answer #1: What is the goal?
There is no shortage of data in social media. In fact, there is an abundance of it, but you have to know which goal you’re driving towards in order to sort through all that data.
Different goals mean different data points. Where on the marketing funnel are you trying to make an impact? Let’s take a look at some examples.

• Goal = awareness. In this case, you’ll want to talk about reach (how many people saw the social post) and engagement (how many people took an action. Engagement rate, which is reach divided by engagement will also be helpful here, to show you if it’s awareness, or QUALITY awareness.)
• Goal = site traffic. Here, you’ll want to track click through rate, along with reach and engagement. Of course, you will optimize your social post for clicks (for example, engagement on Twitter also includes clicks on images, hashtags, your user name, etc.) and use tracking codes along with metrics from your shortened url.
• Goal = leads. Of course, you’ll still want awareness and engagement, but this is a much more finite number. How many emails did you get from the white paper download, for example. Suggested strategies are that you focus on paid campaigns for better results.

(This is an excerpt of a post written on LinkedIn Publisher. View the full post here.)