How to Prove Yourself with Social Media Metrics
In order to understand how effective your social media efforts are, you need to understand what social media metrics are and how to create reports from those metrics. These reports can not only help you personally, but can help you professionally with supporting your clients and with proving yourself to your boss! So let’s take a deeper look into why social media analytics are important and look at examples of reports I would use.
Before we look into my preferred reports, we need to talk about WHY social media metrics are important. In order to create a report, we need to know what all the metrics mean and focus on which types of metrics serve us best.
First and foremost, social media analytics are important because “they can help you understand your audience! Analyzing your past posts can help you find your unique best time to share” that is tailored specifically to your fans (Ray, 2019). You’re posting for the audience that follows your company, so you need to know when that specific audience is on social media the most! Additionally, “media analytics brings to light your marketing strategy which has the best impact on your brand’s online campaigns. For instance, it’s widely accepted that constant quality contents are the strategy used by most brands to pull traffic. But with the analysis, you get to see which has a higher impact than others and you streamline your efforts to that” (Rondot, 2020). And finally, “social analytics helps us simplify data from dozens of networks, millions of people and a variety of activities. Social analytics can give you a far deeper understanding of user behavior and demographic data than Google Analytics ever could. And that is why social media analytics are important” (Midwest Marketing).
Now that we have a base for what social media metrics can do for you and your company, let me give you examples for what kinds of metrics I would incorporate during my social strategy discussions:
Daily Reports For Myself
The metrics I would analyze on a daily basis to see if my social strategy was on the right track would focus more on the superficial side of social media. This would include how many likes is a post getting, how many comments, and how well users are immediately reacting to a post. This can be known as a “regular report, which uses key metrics to show your progress on social — increase in followers, positive sentiment, SOV, etc. Keep it to your brand alone or include competitors for benchmarking” (Carpenter, 2018). This information is also important to present to a boss or a team, but it’s easy to analyze on the forefront directly from social media platforms which is why I suggest making this a personal daily report for myself and others looking to analyze reports.
Weekly Reports For My Immediate Boss
When meeting with my immediate boss, my approach would differ from the daily reports I analyze myself. My boss would probably want to see tangible change and effectiveness with our social media presence, so I would need to provide him with quick and easy to understand positive metrics. For a weekly report, I would want to provide brand awareness related metrics. “Brand Awareness is the attention your brand gets — across all social media — during a reporting period, or a specific span of time that yields statistically relevant data. Attention can be expressed through a variety of social media metrics, including @mentions, shares, links, and impressions. Reporting periods are also variable, usually lasting a week” (Shleyner, 2020). This can show how aware a variety of audiences are to our social media presence which can hopefully correlate to how well we are doing revenue wise.
Monthly Reports For My Monthly Management Team
Monthly reports that I would prove for a larger (and probably more important!) team would relate to how well any and all social campaigns did during that time period. The brand engagement reports I would provide would show the statistics on conversions, volume, engagement, and click-through with bounce rate.
- “Conversions are leads that become paying customers
- Volume is conversion size and brand mentions
- Engagement are the clicks, comments, and shares
- Click-through with bounce rate are website visitors and how long they stay” (Carpenter, 2018).
These four types of metrics can show how well our social campaigns are doing and how much they contribute to our overall company campaign strategy. This is the time to prove why social media is important to the company and, more specifically, prove why what we did during the social campaign worked.
Social media metrics can do so much for personal and professional social media growth. You can do more with it than without it! Any influencer, brand, or company need to implement social media analyzation into their strategy to increase their strategy effectiveness!
