Before you assign specific roles to your social networks, you must first define your short- and long-term goals. You have to determine if you want to increase your revenue by 15% in 3 months or attract 150 new sales leads by the end of this year. These concrete, measurable goals allow you to think which direction your organization needs to work towards so that you can determine which roles your social networks will play in the process.

Once you’ve identified your goals, you have to determine how your social networks will support them. Particularly, you have to see which objectives your social networks can assist with. After all, just like every other marketing communications channel, social media has its limitations. For instance, if your goal is to downsize your company by 25% or targeting consumers who aren’t on the Web, social media probably isn’t your go-to tool. That said, if your goal is to website traffic by 7% in 5 months, social media is your best pal.

You have to see if your social networks are producing positive financial returns for your company. Ultimately, you’re allocating time and resources to manage your social pages and you definitely want to see if your social platforms are making the cash register ring. To determine if your social media initiatives are helping bottom-line, you have to set specific metrics. For instance, if your goal is to increase your online revenue by 5% in 12 months and you’re using Twitter to support this goal, you can use a metric that calculates how much (in percentage) of the total sales was referred by Twitter. You can do so by using Google Analytics’ multi-channel funnels.

If you realize that certain social networks actually don’t generate positive ROIs, you have to either improve your social media marketing strategy or use other social pages or your business goals. For instance, if you realized that Twitter has only brought in 2 sales in the last 6 months, you can either alter your Twitter strategy or utilize another social platform to generate leads. The whole idea is to be agile and adaptive to all changes.