Tracking your social media campaign is vital if you want to understand how your content and activities perform both in real-time and in retrospect. Setting up a system of metrics is not just for the number-crunching lovers on your team, it is also an important framework for analyzing where your content goes and if those spheres of interaction could open new doors to going beyond social media engagement and help you create more business.Tracking can be done in as many ways as there are projects, and as we will describe in the next two posts about tracking tools to meet your metrics goals we went with a set of platforms and indicators that we felt would best serve our needs.

And needs is an important word: Why are you tracking something, and for what will you use the tracked data? Before you breathe life into a huge tracking monster, consider what core metrics will give you the best understanding of the goals you’ve set up for the project.

We would also suggest weeding out all the things that will only serve as extra layers of data, and avoid spending time with too many different metrics. Keep it simple and strictly defined by your project goals. That way you’re more likely to spend time during and after the campaign understanding the all the valuable information that lives inside the eons of data you will most definitely generate.

We set up tracking well before the campaign started, both to have a set of benchmarks that we could use with key quantitative indicators relating to visitor stats on the main website, and to benchmark the amount of followers, comments, likes, etc., on Facebook and Twitter across the three team member organizations.

But the pre-campaign tracking was also a way to test our ability to manage and analyze the incoming data and to get rid of overkill elements.

As we felt more and more assured that we had the tracking parameters needed for our metrics we sealed off the tracking compartment in order to avoid a slow data creep throughout the project.

If you don’t use the same data sets, or if you start adding new sets along the way, you will run into trouble at the end of the road once you want to use those numbers to for instance help you make the case for sponsor ROI, funding for new projects, data reporting, etc.

In the next two posts we will go into more detail about the specific tools we used and the tracking parameters we chose from the huge array of potentials out there.