It has always been challenging for businesses to determine the right resource allocation for the successful implementation of a social media strategy. Many organizations find it hard to improve the effectiveness of a social media strategy in promoting brands and increasing revenues. An iterative quantification framework, the right tools, and the ability to quantify key business relationships are critical in increasing a strategy’s effectiveness.

1. - Girish Khanzode
Improving Effectiveness of Social Media Strategy
A Quantification Framework for Optimum investments and fully leveraging
the social platform potential
INSIGHTS

2. Over the past few years, organizations
are increasingly tapping into social
media to understand customer behavior;
improve brand value, operations, product,
services and reputation; develop focused
campaigns; and receive early warnings of
potential customer issues.
Social media has significantly altered how
companies conduct their business and
it has become a powerful connection-
building tool with the stakeholders. As
internet is increasingly used for business
transactions, it is now critical for companies
to influence the online opinions of
stakeholders with the help of high quality
relationships that must be built using their
social media programs.
At the same time, companies find it
challenging to capture and leverage
the immense potential that these new
platforms offer. They are also faced with the
problem of figuring out the right amount
of investments for their social media
initiatives.
Studies indicate that 80% of companies
agree that social media is a strategically
important tool for effectively running
their business, but only 20% believe they
are leveraging most of the opportunities
offered by the medium. Majority of
companies do not have standard
frameworks in place for systematically
extracting benefits from social media
programs. Three-fourth of companies do
not have programs to measure the value
obtained by their social media initiatives.
Nearly half of companies do not allocate
their budgets based on returns from
social media programs but do it based
on historical spending patterns or gut
instinct. Companies are spending billions
of dollars on brand promotions and
media communications. However, they
are allotting just a minuscule percentage
to compute returns, which is critical to
optimize investments. Difficulties in
directly correlating various online activities
of stakeholders to objectives of a social
media program create further challenges.
As a result, most of the companies are
befuddled when it comes to measuring the
impact of their social media investments
and figuring out how to improve its
effectiveness.

3. Creating an Effective Social
Media Program
In order to achieve higher effectiveness
of a social media initiative, companies
must avoid common pitfalls and focus on
following key points.
Social media should not be regarded as
another medium to advertise but as a
stakeholder ecosystem whose goodwill
is critical to success of the business. As
consumers embrace the web as a preferred
channel for shopping of goods and
services, they are increasingly making
their purchase decisions based on online
opinions of other consumers. They are
also more likely to prefer brands that are
perceived socially and environmentally
responsible, honest and transparent. In
order to leverage these trends, social
media programs must focus on building
a robust reputation amongst their
target communities and create deeper
relationships. When companies actively
listen to community members and quickly
address their needs, there will be a positive
impact on sales and brand perception will
ascend over time.
As social media has redefined timescales
due to lightening dissemination of
information, brand monitoring must be
round-the-clock with clear policies for
rapid response to issues as they arise. A
problem must be addressed before it goes
viral since reputations might get damaged
within hours. Having good relations with
the stakeholder communities ensures that
in such cases the brand is passionately
defended by the members, thus reducing
the overall negative impact.
Social media has given rise to a new
breed of dominant individuals with large
and loyal followers. Opinions of these
influencers can sway the brand perception
with much more intensity than ordinary
individuals. A social media initiative
must concentrate on converting these
key individuals to brand champions by
building good relationships, in order to
benefit from their vocal advocacy.
Social media programs must focus on all
the stakeholders rather than a subset, since
they collectively magnify the influence
that a social media initiative attempts to
build. Examples of these stakeholders
include customers, employees, suppliers
and business partners, investors, media,

4. thought leaders, analysts, government
representatives and civil societies.
Higher number of“like”,“tweet”or“pin”will
not guarantee more sales. However, the
quality and depth of engagements with
stakeholders will surely influence it over
the period. As long as the program focuses
on fostering healthy relationships based
on trust, satisfaction, credibility, stability
and mutual exchange, a brand will
continue to flourish.
Importance of Quantifying
Relationships
The effectiveness of a social media program
is directly dependent on the quality of
the associations with stakeholders. The
reputation of a brand is a collective outcome
of all the relationships that a social media
program is able to build over time.
If a program can nurture high quality,
rich and positive relationships, the
management will witness a rapid and
significant conversion of potential
customers to loyal fans, directly leading
to higher revenues. It will become much
easier for a company to promote itself,
innovate at a faster rate, retain employees
longer and operate more profitably. If the
program fails to achieve expectations,
there will be a drop in customer
loyalty, brand value, employee tenures,
revenues and operating costs, leading to
competitors surging ahead.
In order to figure out if a social media
program is indeed delivering the intended
objectives, the health of relationships
must be quantified. If the quality of
engagements cannot be calculated,
effectiveness of the program cannot
be understood or improved. It is also
important to carry out quantification on
a continuous basis, to precisely identify
incremental investments and achieve
excellence.
As part of this process, data must be
collected at regular intervals, analyzed and
measured against the predefined goals
of the program. Derived results should be
used to improve the program making it
more efficient. Results will also benefit in
building a data driven decision-making
culture, perform high precision strategic
planning and improve understanding of
competitor capabilities. Establishment of
a mature measurement program will lead
to continuous improvements in business
processes helping a company to survive
and thrive.
Ability to quantify and analyze what is
relevant for the goals of a social media
program is fundamental to controlling its
effectiveness and must be systematically
implemented with right rigor to reap the
rewards.

5. Selecting Right Tools
Business relationships can be quantified by
measuring opinions. With rapid advances
in technology, there is a plethora of free
and paid offerings available to compute
and analyze online opinions. Availability
of public data from a large number online
resources and automated content analysis
tools has made it easier to conduct
analytics for mapping stakeholder activities
to social media program goals.
Once the stakeholder cluster to monitor is
identified, simple and free tools like Twitter
Feeds, Google alerts can be used to track
the exchanges of opinions containing
brand and competitors. Surveys are also a
powerful method to quantify perceptions.
Costs need not be very high since entire
representative sample of USA can be
captured with less than 1000 contributors.
Media content analysis and Sentiment
analysis are necessary to quantify what
the universe of customers, prospects,
competitors and media is discussing about
the brand and offerings. Automated tools
are convenient when conversation volumes
are enormous. With the accuracy of 50%,
these tools provide speed, processing
consistency and cost savings. However,
they are not as accurate as manual analysis
when it comes to subjective assessment or
contextual analysis of content with respect
to tone, slang, culture, customs or sarcasm.
When messages and discussions are
intricate, manual analysis is a better option
but it is slow, expensive and may suffer
from the individual bias.
The most important point is that the
selection of processing methods and
tools must solely be guided by goals of a
social media program in order to meet its
objectives. For example, success of a web
campaign or event will need web server
analytics; brand awareness quantification
will need online survey software, severity
of quality issues will require sentiment
analysis tools and finding effectiveness of
message in the media will require media
analysis products.
Establishing a Quantification
Framework
In order to allocate optimum budgets
using a systematic approach and fully
leverage the benefits of social media
initiatives, it is critical to put in place a
quantification framework along with
dedicated resources. It will help quantify
and analyze the key business relationships
by continuously collecting social data.
Computed results will enable fine-tuning
the social strategy using periodic reviews.
1. Identify Social Program Objectives
What results you want to see from
social media initiative? What problem
are you trying to solve? Objectives
should be trackable, tangible and
value-add for the brand. These
can be categorized into multiple
areas like business, commercial and
communication. Selected objectives
should converge to high-level business
goals like brand perception, innovation,
revenue generation, operational

6. efficiencies or customer experience.
Examples include - improve brand
awareness, attract talent or acquire
new customers.
2. Determine Target Stakeholder Cluster
Focus on the sections of social
population relevant to your goals
and objectives. How do these people
currently perceive your brand? What
is current influence level? Once these
are known, you can tailor your social
media efforts to convert the target
stakeholders towards the objectives
and achieve the level of engagement
you want.
3. Identify Stakeholder Needs
What issues matter to your target
audience? What inspires them? What
motivates them to purchase your
offerings? What are the concerns
discussed most? Analyzing and
executing actions based on stakeholder
concerns accelerates high value
relationship building and achieves
program goals faster.
4. Establish Yardsticks
Identify how you will compare your
findings. These could be the industry
best practices, sector leaders, peers
or past performance of your own
company. Continuous tracking of
quantified data against accepted
yardsticks will help steer the program
towards objectives in an effective
manner.
5. Allocate Resources
Start with initial budget based on
past allocations or any other suitable
criterion. Once quantification process
matures, resource and budget
allocations must be decided by returns
on investments made in the past. Higher
allocations should be funneled into
initiatives that are providing maximum
results at the cost of failing ones, as
demonstrated by quantified results. This
ensures that your social media efforts
are optimally executed and providing
higher returns as time progresses.
6. Choose Performance Indicators
Identify key criterion of success and
outcome measures for the goals.
Decide the measurement method for
conversions of stakeholders to program
objectives. Instead of measuring
everything, narrow down to a set of
quantifiable attributes that closely
match with predefined goals. The
temptation to quantify something just
because you have a tool for it must be
avoided. Quantifying wrong parameters
is worse than measuring nothing.
7. Monitor Progress
Decide what you want to monitor. Keep
a close watch on what is working and
what is not. Apply strategies that are
yielding best results. Conduct periodic
reviews, draw actionable conclusions
and relate them to objectives; and
make changes. Taking periodic actions
based on tracking results will ensure
that social media program is kept on
its chartered path with period course
corrections.
8. Compute Returns
Compute returns on your investments.
Track the type of promotions that add
most to profits. Calculate the change
in desired outcome based on each
dollar invested and returns achieved.
Keep an eye on social platforms that
generate the most sales so that you can
invest more in them to achieve higher
effectiveness.

7. A systematic implementation of this
framework will be highly useful in
quantifying and creating rich business
connections with employees, customers,
investors, partners, civil societies and
measuring impact of web campaigns,
promotions, PR initiatives, loyalty
programs, media events or sponsorships. It
will result in benefits like higher customer
acquisitions, repeat customers, referrals,
web site traffic, employee loyalty; and
reduction in customer issues.

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Author Profile
Girish Khanzode
Products & Platforms Innovator for Futuristic
Technologies, Infosys
Girish is a veteran in Enterprise Software Product
design and development with more than 2
decades of professional experience. He has built
and led large product engineering teams to
deliver highly complex products in a variety of
domains, covering entire product life cycle. He
is involved in innovating and building the next
generation products and platforms in emerging
new technology areas like Enterprise Data
Security and Privacy, Enterprise Collaboration,
Digital Workplace, Social Analytics, Smart Cities,
Big Data and Internet of Things. Girish holds M.
Tech. degree in Computer Engineering.