By conducting an audit on your competitors’ social networks, you can compare your social media performance with theirs. With this assessment, you can for instance identify that your competitors attain roughly an average of 5 likes per Facebook post or 2 retweets per tweet. This will help you gain a better understanding of the type of social media results you should be generating or surpassing. 

A conversation audit assesses the different conversations online related to your brand or industry. By conducting a conversation audit, you can find out what percentage of the industry-related conversations online or on Twitter is about your brand. By performing a conversation audit, you can for example discover that only 1% of the total conversations on Twitter is about your brand. This can help you determine if you’re lacking a strong digital presence. In addition, you can use a conversation audit to compare the percentage of the online conversations about your brand to your competitors. This will help you determine your brand’s mind share, awareness, and popularity. You may even find the best time to tweet. 

A sentiment analysis measures the positivity or negativity of your brand. With a sentiment analysis, you rate each comment regarding your brand on a 5-point scale; 1 means negative, 2 means slightly negative, 3 means neutral, 4 means slightly positive, and 5 means positive. By rating each blog comment, tweet, or Facebook comment based on this scale, you can accumulate a total score for all the remarks about your brand. This will allow you to evaluate the positivity or negativity of your brand. 

With the introduction of numerous social media services, you now have a handle of tools that you can use to listen to your prospects’ online conversations and find the perfect sales opportunity. To listen to your audience’s online conversations, you can select certain keywords that you want to monitor through HootSuite or Sprout Social and join in the conversation when an opportunity arises. You can also create a HootSuite dashboard just for specific prospects or clients who you want to interact with. This will allow you to see the different Facebook posts or tweets that your prospective clients are posting and find the perfect opportunity to promote your service to them.

Goal-setting is critical in digital media. The objectives have to be targeted, quantifiable that you can measure in the future. For instance, your goal should be “increase Twitter community by 8% in 12 weeks” instead of “grow Twitter audience.” This will help you clearly identify if you have achieved your goal in the near future. In addition to creating more macro goals such as one above, you can create smaller micro goals to help support your larger objective. For instance, you can come up with micro goals such as “increase the number of retweets by 5% week-over-week in the next 12 weeks” to support your overall goal such as one above. 

A weekly scorecard enables you to determine your weekly digital marketing performance. It provides you with insights such as web traffic, Twitter community growth rate, and bounce rate. These stats can help you see if there are any suspicious or alarming issues and resolve them quickly. Moreover, a scorecard allows you as well as the rest of your team to have a transparent view of your current digital marketing performance. By creating a weekly scorecard, you can go over each key metric (i.e. web traffic and bounce rate) with your team and come up with solutions to your problems. On the other hand, if everything is going well, it provides you with a great opportunity to pat your team members on the back.