How to create a social media score card

Don't laugh, but social media measurement can be fun - especially when you share the fun with your team.

Often they like seeing what's working and what's not. If you invite them into the process, they can help you in ways you might not have imagined.

One idea for sharing your social media successes is to come up with a simple score card.

As the data and analytics all of these robust systems spit out can be daunting and inaccessible, you can help communicate key metrics and successes by distilling this into a one-page report you can share with management and select team members. Start by planning a basic Word document and split it into a grid with either six cells (two columns, three rows) or eight cells (two columns, four rows). In each cell include a data point you're watching and why.

Make it a mix of objective-based relevant recipes as well as some fun qualitative items.

Here are some ideas on data points you might include on your score card:

' Key social metrics such as 'share of voice” - Select one of your leading objective-based outcomes. For these first two metrics you share, clearly restate how they help you reach your defined business objective such as branding or sales. (Example: 40 percent share of voice for local banking conversations versus 34 percent last month.)'Key website metric such as new visitors versus returning or average time on site - Again, tie this metric to a business objective.

' Follower/like counts - While these numbers don't matter the most, they are metrics that a majority of people understand and can identify with. Keeping track of your overall reach can be fun for others to observe.

' Mentions with or without sentiment metrics - Whether or not you include sentiment depends on your marketing objective.

' Top content - Sharing the top three most trafficked blog posts over the past month helps your team - especially your blog authors - know what's getting traction and what they can help you create more of. It also can help spark new ideas.

' Klout score - This metric provides a nice 'quality score” to your marketing.

' Customer story/tweet of the month - Again, it's nice to have some qualitative insights here, too. What stories are you hearing from customers? Was there a neat Facebook comment or customer tweet? As marketers we hear this feedback all the time but others in your organization might be starving for these real-life stories.

' Instagram photo of the month - This helps your team 'see” the results of your work as well.

With your score card mapped out in Word or something similar, you can easily grab screenshots from various dashboards from Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, Klout and more.

Once you have a format you and your team like, it won't take much for you to update this each month.

While we'd like to believe that everyone reads the multi-page reports we send out each month, you'll find that the score card approach will be more effective at bringing your team in sync with what you're working on.

l Nick Westergaard is founder of Brand Driven Digital; nick@westergaard.com; @nickwestergaard