Social media is moving so fast that businesses are struggling to keep up. So many channels are offering to help you reach out to your customers, and so much data is available on each one, that it’s hard to know what to do, what to measure, and where to start. Social media is still a young industry. I recently heard that 85% of people who work in social media have been in the industry less than two years, so it’s no surprise that there is lots of confusion and misunderstanding about what’s the best thing to do.

Many businesses correctly begin by trying to define a social media strategy. Strategy in its purest form tells a business where it wants to go and why, and the things that it needs to do to arrive there successfully. The difficulties begin when you are trying to solve a long list of business problems based on what different people in the organization deem to be important.

Some people want more “likes” because their goal is increased awareness. Others may struggle with losing customers and want improved customer service to reduce churn rates. Whichever challenge your strategy is trying to solve, you will find only a short-term solution if you deal with each challenge in isolation. What you need is an integrated approach that puts social media at the heart of your business as a solid foundation for long-term growth.

For this reason, I’ve developed a simple model—with an admittedly cheesy name—called the “Like-Cycle” from Adobe. It’s based on I’ve seen and learned from brands, such as Amazon, Starbucks, Walmart, Nike, and Burberry, and aims to help brands develop a 360-degree approach to digital marketing.

The Like-Cycle from Adobe ties together the five key social marketing challenges that most brands struggle with and emphasizes the need to build all marketing activity on a solid strategy based on an understanding of data and intelligence. At Adobe, we believe that these questions can be answered using a solution from Adobe® Marketing Cloud, but most of the principles discussed here can be applied by the tools that you are currently using.

The five challenges most businesses face in social media are:

• What type of “likes” do you want?—Who are you trying to reach and why?
• What are you going to do with them?—Do you have interesting content and a good engagement strategy?
• How are you going to keep them?—Building loyalty is often a brand’s biggest priority, but it’s getting harder to keep people’s attention.
• What is the value of a “like”?—Your social media strategy will never get off the ground properly unless you understand the meaning of social ROI.
• What is the cost of a “like”?—How much are you willing to pay to attract someone’s attention, and is it worth reallocating funds from a different channel?

Although this is not specifically a Facebook conversation, it’s as good a starting point as any. You can replace Likes with followers, viewers, pinners, or connections. Don’t get hung up on the language. We’re trying to build a people-focused strategy, not a social network–focused strategy.

Big data: Providing the foundation for business decisions

Recently, Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, estimated that, “Every two days we now create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003.” That equates to about 5 exabytes of data reproduced every 48 hours. His statement highlights the vast amount of data that brands now have at their fingertips, which is a good thing for marketers who want to build a brand based on solid insights. But what we’re starting to see more and more is what the media calls analysis paralysis.

While that old management adage that you can’t manage what you don’t measure still rings true, measuring too many things can also suck the lifeblood out of a team and waste valuable time and resources. Knowing which metrics matter most and then having a clear vision of how to communicate those metrics to the wider businesses is extremely important.

Strategy: Defining where the business needs to go

Without a foundation of solid data that is unique to your brand, it’s almost impossible to create a relevant strategy to drive your company forward. Strategy is often misunderstood and stated as, “We want to have the largest market share in our sector” or “We aim to have the highest level of customer service in our industry.” Those are good objectives, but they’re not strategy. Even worse is when strategy is described in terms of a fan acquisition campaign: “We want to reach one million fans by Christmas.” That’s a goal, not a strategy.

A strategy is a coherent mix of policy and action designed to solve a difficult—usually high-stakes— challenge. Basically that means, where are we going, why are we going there, and what do we need to do to get there. A strategy is like a road sign telling us where we need to go, but it must have an action attached to it. Outlining a good strategy isn’t actually that hard.

The best strategies are usually broken up into three parts:

• Diagnosis—Why are we here? What is the nature of the problem?
• Policy—How are we going to solve this problem? What is our basic approach going to be?
• Action—What are we going to do to reach our goals and objectives?

I’ve put strategy, driven by data gained from a social insight tool such as Adobe Social, at the heart of the Like-Cycle from Adobe. Without accurate data or a solid strategy, solving issues surrounding content, loyalty, fan acquisition, or media buying is just a short-term tactical solution. What you need is a long-term strategic plan that helps social media drive your business forward. That leads us to the challenges that brands face on a daily basis. Let’s look at them one at a time.

What type of “Likes” do you want?

Understanding who your customers are and what they care about is at the heart of every successful social media campaign. One of the first jobs I had in social media was preparing a ridiculously large report for a major brand that included just about everything it would ever want to know about its customers. The report included customer segmentation information, brand tracker indices, market research, focus group insight, and consumer intelligence. Needless to say, this report cost thousands of pounds to produce, many months to make, and several agencies to create. It’s probably also no surprise that after the introduction and executive summary, very little of the rest of the report ever got read.

Just because you can measure everything, doesn’t mean that you should. Successful social brands like Starbucks, Dell, and Microsoft have solved this by reducing most of their reporting to only one page. That page includes all the relevant information and metrics that they need to know about their customers. I’ve heard it called the five Ws, simply stating in concise terms which customers matter most to the business and why. This format also works well for senior executives to read and understand quickly, which might also explain why these brands have such large social media budgets.

The five Ws are:

• Who are the people talking about you the most?
• What are they saying?
• Why are they talking about you?
• When did these conversations happen?
• Where did these conversations take place?

Using social media to help answer those five simple questions will have an impact far beyond the marketing department. Money on advertising can be spent more effectively with better targeting. But social intelligence such as this also has a huge value to customer service, operations, sales, finance, and commercial teams. Collating and effectively communicating this kind of information across a business is how you get buy-in from other departments. It’s also how you get larger budgets to do more innovative projects in social media.

Who is talking about you?

You might have thousands of fans on your page, but the only thing that really matters is exactly who cares about you. Who is most likely to make a purchase or recommend you to their friend. Many times, you need to speak to only a small percentage of your fans. In my experience, less than 10% of your fans hold any real value to the business. Highlighting these fans and targeting them with the right messages at the right time is key to the success of your social media efforts. It’s also highly likely that a very small number of fans will influence a much larger number. Harvard Research once stated that 5% of any given group can bring about change in the remaining 95%. I believe the same is true in social media.

What are they saying?

To build a strong conversation strategy to engage with your consumers online, you need to understand what they’re saying. What are the trending topics, what are the most used keywords, and which subjects do they care about most? If you’re a computer company and keep talking about that great celebrity who endorses your products, it won’t make any difference in the world if the only thing your customers talk about is the length of their battery life.

Why are they talking about us?

Understanding customer behavior and why people do the things they do has always troubled businesses. But just because it’s hard doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do it. Many of the fastest growing businesses in the world employ consultants to work on predictive analysis to estimate future market share, shape future campaigns, or assess the effectiveness of the current one. Remember, it’s a lot easier to get approval for that exciting campaign that you want to run when you can present projections based on evidence about how your fans act.

When did these conversations take place?

The average half-life of a tweet is currently estimated to be between 6 and 7 minutes. The half-life of the average video clip on YouTube is less than an hour, and a really good post on Facebook is somewhere in between. Bearing in mind that people now check their mobile devices up to 150 times a day, responding to the right conversation at the right time is critical to your success. Whether you just want to increase engagement or improve customer service, timing is everything. Many brands work incredibly well with agencies and outsourced community management teams, but processes can often slow things down too much. The only thing your customer cares about is you being there when they want to speak to you, not the other way around. Oreo had the most successful campaign of this year’s Super Bowl with just a $5 thousand promoted tweet, because they reacted to the power outage within 4 minutes on Twitter—no small feat when you consider that there were 136 other advertisements on TV during the game, each costing in the region of $3.7 million. Timing is everything.

Where did these conversations take place?

What good is a great social media strategy if you don’t know where to employ your tactics? It’s like the most prepared army in the world, with the most advanced weapons, stood on the wrong battlefield. It’s not going to get you very far. Know where you customers spend their time and the differences between each social network. Not only does this help you measure the impact of your social media activity (share of voice over time, network by network), but also accurately allocate time and resources where they’re going to be most useful.

What are you going to do with them? It’s been said many times that content is king, but it’s actually content with context that is king. The key to any social media success is communicating the right message to the right person at the right time. To do this effectively, you must understand the kind of social intelligence that we’ve just discussed to produce compelling content that will resonate with your audience.

Many tools on the market can help you create and publish content to social networks based on what people are talking about, but the thing to remember is that a content strategy cannot be built based on what you think people want to see. People act differently within social media compared to other digital channels. It’s also important to know whether your audience in social media is the same audience that you are used to talking to on more traditional online channels. In a lot of cases, brands are surprised to discover that the customers that they talk to on Facebook are a totally different demographic than they expected, so the content that they use for TV, radio, billboard, or press might not be relevant at all. Social media content should do at least one of these four things: inspire, inform, challenge, or entertain. Hopefully, it does more than one of these things at the same time. If it doesn’t do any, you should question why you are doing it. Social media is mainly about listening and then acting. This action may involve building a great conversation strategy for community management, establishing an engaging content calendar full of video, or developing creative applications that harvest important data and provide value to your users.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution for content and community management, but the best guide I have ever come across is what I call the 90:10 rule. It basically states that customer-facing brands should focus 90% of their attention on reaching out to customers and being obsessed with every single conversation they are having about them and spend just 10% of the time creating content. Far too many brands spend 90% of their time creating great content, but only 10% of their time talking and listening to their customers.

The kings of relevant content are Red Bull. I’ve always admired their provocative but simple content strategy. Quoting word for word: “Fifty percent of people use social media to waste time, so let’s just give them some really cool s**t to do when they get there.”

How are you going to keep them?

Customer loyalty is arguably the most important element of any business strategy, let alone a social media strategy. Finding customers, targeting them with media or content, and keeping their attention is incredibly hard. It is also incredibly expensive. We’ve talked about customer insight and deciding what content to serve them. Now you need to understand how to keep them coming back.

The old marketing statistic that it can be seven times cheaper to keep an existing customer than acquire a new one still rings true. Depending on which industry you’re in, acquiring a new customer could cost you anywhere from £1–£1,000. A common misconception is that social media is cheap and easy because anybody can post to Facebook or Twitter for free. Certainly, a great deal of educating needs to take place in many boardrooms, but when senior executives realize that social media is good for saving money, not just making money, we’re likely to see bigger budgets invested in social media for customer service and loyalty programs.

Some reports state that 90% of users who “like” a page never return. I’ve also heard it said that Facebook users “like” on average five or six brand pages. I can’t back this up with an official report, but I’m sure it’s not far off when you look across all 1.06 billion accounts. So your brand is not just competing for your customer’s attention with your competitors, you’re also competing with Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga, and Beyonce. How does your content stack up against their pages?

Figuring out exactly what you are going to do to keep your customers after you’ve got their attention is the third-most important piece of the “Like-Cycle” from Adobe. Without loyalty, everything else falls apart, no matter how good your content is or how deep your social intelligence goes.

What is the value of a like?

You understood what your customers are saying about you and why. You’ve created a solid content calendar, and you’re working hard to retain their attention. Now how do you figure out if all your efforts are worth anything. People understand the scale and power of social media, and they understand that it has a value, they just don’t know how to prove it. It wasn’t that long ago that consulting companies were trying to work out the value of a fan. Some stated it was $136.38, others said a like wasn’t worth anything.

Social media superstar, Gary Vaynerchuk, response is, “What’s the ROI of your mother?”, suggesting that you shouldn’t try to put a value on a relationship. Gary says that “The ROI of my mother is everything!” Some smart people also correctly state that the value of a like can have a negative value, especially if fans are saying bad things all the time.

Actually, the ROI of social media isn’t that hard to measure. It’s no different from measuring ROI in any other area of business.

ROI is simply = [Revenue – Investment] / Investment * 100

For example, a company that has generated £10,000 in sales and has spent £1,000 on a campaign has an ROI of 900%. For every £1 spent, the company has driven £9 in sales.

Working out how to track those sales and what constitutes an investment is a trickier matter, but that doesn’t make the initial equation any more complicated. If you can track conversions from social media to your website or a checkout, working out ROI doesn’t need to be overly complicated. Digital marketing tools are available to help you tie your social media activity to your business goals and sales.

If, on the other hand, you are a fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) brand (consumer packaged goods (CPG) brand if you’re in the United States), measuring the net promoter score (NPS) in social media or cost savings across customer service, for example, would be another useful way of calculating ROI. The Like-Cycle from Adobe model is intended to show that social media makes money and saves money.

ROI is not, as has been suggested at times, return on influence, impressions, interactions, or ignorance. In my opinion, the secret to social media success is for digital marketers to stop using clever language and just start talking to business executives in the same language they have been using for years. Yes, we all love social media because it has a scale and reach unlike anything we have ever seen in history, but the person controlling the brand budget cares about how social media impacts the bottom line. If you want a larger budget to run more innovative campaigns, increase market share, or drive the business forward into new areas, then you must understand how to calculate ROI for your brand.

Don’t forget that data also has a value and can be worked into an equation when calculating ROI. For instance, for some companies, getting someone’s name, email address, and mobile number might be worth £10.

What is the cost of a like?

The final piece of the Like-Cycle from Adobe is media buying. I purposely saved it for last, because a good media plan is the lifeblood of a strong campaign, fan growth strategy, or a viral success. It is of upmost importance to properly understand your customers and their value to the business before deciding how much you are willing to spend to get their attention.

Spending the right amount of money on the right channel to target the right person at the right time are the foundations for any good media planning strategy, but it’s a lot harder than it looks. There are many ways that brands can self-serve through Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn ads, but because media buying usually involves an agency or media buying tools, that’s a bigger conversation than what I’m presenting here. Suffice it to say that if you understand the previous four parts of the Like-Cycle from Adobe model, there needn’t be any fear or uncertainty around the effectiveness of a media campaign. As we looked at with measuring ROI, this is a simple case of return on investment. For every £1 spent on Facebook, you need to understand that it might have driven £5 in sales.

Securing a budget for media is often the hardest challenge for a growing business. Many brands looking to develop their social media presence often struggle because they don’t have a full understanding of their customers. The purpose of this Like-Cycle from Adobe is to encourage brands to get away from fragmented marketing and to embrace a more integrated approach. Social media marketing is often perceived as being cheap and easy, but without all the pieces to the puzzle lining up correctly, it can be very hard and expensive.