DEVELOPING A VISUAL STORYTELLING ROAD MAP: FROM STRATEGY TO IMPLEMENTATION 129 Evaluating Your Current Efforts If you already have a system for measuring your social media content efforts, that’s great. If you don’t, we recommend building a good old Excel spreadsheet. The purpose of this process is to identify the ways in which your current social media content strategy supports your goals and to iden- tify your top-performing content themes and types. The end goal is to evaluate your current program and create a benchmark against which to measure your visual storytelling efforts going forward. We understand fully that some companies may just be starting out, while others have been incorporating visuals into their social media con- tent calendars for some time. Whichever the case, this exercise will force you to evaluate all of your efforts by platform and dig a little deeper into the rationale behind the messages and content types you’re putting out. Determine a reasonable timeframe in which to run these metrics, with the schedule depending on your frequency of posting to social media and the tools and resources you have at your disposal. If you can build a larger sample size of three to six months, that’s fantastic, but if two is more scal- able, do the best you can. Tracking Data If you decide to do the audit yourself in a very basic way, in the Excel spreadsheet you want to look at key factors that play a role in the success of your content. Depending on your social media audience, posts may be more effective at specific times of day, or your fans may prefer photos to videos. To evaluate these factors, create a spreadsheet with a different tab for each social media platform you have a presence on. Keep each of the following as individual columns or rows so you can filter as needed. • Date • Time of day • Day of the week • Content type: for example, photo, video, text