Ever watched the movie The Sound of Music? A whole family of musically talented people singing in curtains instantly pick up perfect tone on the first try. Some people are just naturally talented and for the rest of us, we need well defined structure and practice in order to accomplish our tasks. Just like learning a musical scale from Do to Do, when you first start out in social media analytics you need to know the language and stages you will end up going through during the process so that you always hit that perfect tone. Just as Maria told us, let’s start at the very beginning which is a very good place to start. Before you start building fancy reports and playing with percentages, you need to understand what it is you are building. Let’s walk through some of the words we use and resources on how to use and define them for your own data.

Goals
The first you need to do before diving in, is to define the goals that you are trying to accomplish through your efforts. These goals don’t have to always be defined in numbers. They can be all encompassing like, “Our goal is to grow the amount of opportunities we have to engage with our customers”. Sometimes it can be hard to get yourself started setting goals, but try to think of these as the big dreams that you are hoping to achieve. Remember that these are your goals, which gives you the right to adjust and re-evaluate as you move along.

Read More: Social Media Strategy: Defining Good Goals Neicole Crepeau

KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) versus Metrics
Once you have your goals defined you’ll need to find the ways that you will measure the success or failure of these goals. In order to do this you need to define not just metrics, the formulas that show shifts in your data caused by your efforts, but a few Key Performance Indicators or KPI’s. Now, we may think that metrics and KPI’s are the same and yes they can be, but the main difference is that a KPI holds more weight. Where a metric may help you decide some little things, KPI’s are designed to help you make those big decisions. The changes to KPI’s are often what your executive suite like to track.

Read More: From ROI to KPI: Shonali Burke
List of Social Media Measurement KPIs: Jeremiah Owyang

Measurement
The measurement phase is where you are actually putting those metrics and your KPI’s into practice. You are tracking your data, classifying it and preparing the information so that down the line you can analzye and report on it. This is where you will use your social media monitoring platform, web analytics platform, CRM system or any other software that your company supports to help track the shifts in your data.

Read More: 6 Buckets of Social Media Measurement: Jason Peck
Social Media Data Dredging: Tom Webster

Analysis/Insights
When you perform the analysis of your data, you are looking for the “Why” behind the numbers. What caused the shifts? Why was there an increase or a decrease? How did the shift impact the overall picture? This is the first place where you will use the numbers to start telling the story of your goals and build those key insights that tell your teams exactly what’s happening out there. Telling someone that your Share of Voice increased by 5% is valuable, but telling someone your Share of Voice increased by 5% because of the increased adoption of your product in the technology sector versus your three main competitors is even better. Always make sure you know the exact reasons behind the deltas so you are never surprised by the numbers.

Read More: Introducing the Social Analytics Lifecycle: Ken Burbary

Actionable Items
These are the gold results that we are all looking for. They relate back to our goals and tell us what we are going to do, based on the results we saw in our data, to achieve or maintain our goals. We use our Analysis and Insight phase to build these actionable items. If we saw that we had a higher adoption rate in the technology sector than our three main competitors, we might want to say an actionable item for this insight is to continue to provide resources to that sector. We always want to make sure that our Actionable items relate back to our goals so that we continue to grow and maintain our efforts.

Read More: Too Much Data Versus Actual Insights: Chuck Hemann

What steps do you follow as a company when diving into your analytics? Do you have a set process you follow? Is there one person or many people responsible for this process?

Tags: Chuck Hemann, Data analysis, goals, Jason Peck, Jeremiah Owyang, Ken Burbary, KPI, metrics, Neicole Crepeau, Shonali Burke, Social Media, social media measurement, The Future of Analytics, Tom Webster