How do you gauge the health of your brand on social media? To best answer that question it is important to work through the following 5 steps.

1. Determine Goals

Set short-term and long term goals. These won’t be the same for everyone and it’s important to determine what’s important to your brand. Ensure that your social media goals align with your business goals.

2. Set a Benchmark

What will you use to compare your brand against? Is there someone out there you think is doing it right? Does it make more sense to set a benchmark of where you are today? Take the time to ask these questions and understand the metrics that you want to measure yourself against.

3. Measure What Matters

Don’t get caught up in what everyone else is measuring. Focus on metrics that indicate whether you are reaching your business goals. Fancy pie charts and graphs that don’t demonstrate how you are moving the mark are a waste of time.

Metrics to Consider: Volume, Sentiment, your mentions compared to your competitors, sales leads, point of need outreach, support issues resolved, engagement levels

 4. Report on Results

Once you have started to measure, report on the results so that your team and company are aware. During our most recent Twitter chat, Lauren Vargas shared a great recommendation of aligning the release of your reports with other business reports.

 5. Start Over

Continually review your goals and determine whether they are still relevant. Try not to adjust your benchmark unless it is no longer relevant for your new goals. Measure consistently and report often. Remember the goal in social media isn’t (usually) to be popular, your success will be dependent on whether or not you are achieving the goals you have set for yourself.

Learn how to use a social media command center to guage the heath of your brand in this free ebook below.

This post originally appeared on the Salesforce Marketing Cloud Blog.