Proof in the Pudding

Social media campaigns can be a great way for your company to increase brand awareness, web traffic, customers and loyalty, but how do you know when it’s working? How can you prove social media is what’s driving the success your brand is seeing? Analytics is the answer, and while it sounds complicated there are many tools out there today that can streamline your process. Social media goals are what drive the analytics you should be using. Having a snazzy campaign is all well and good, but if you don’t have clear goals then you won’t have any metrics that tell you if your campaign is hitting the mark. Analytics drive the behind-the-scenes story of your campaign. They tell a clear picture of success and areas of improvement. They also are the meat and potatoes that back you up when you need more resources or budget increases. Today companies are realizing the impact that social media can have and giving social media managers a seat at the table, but without data to back up that importance we’re still sitting at the kiddie table. With this in mind the importance of the right analytics cannot be overstated.

Each platform has their own analytics and while some metrics are the same across the platforms some are different. It’s important to understand what each has to offer and what they tell you. Engagement tends to be a metric that is popular to track that shows how engaged your audience is with your brand. Looking at a range of metrics will give you a better picture such as likes, retweets or shares, comments and mentions. You can also determine audience demographics and how many times your posts are being seen and by how many people (impressions and reach).

Conceptualizing all of these analytics into a report is an important part of managing social media. All of the data in the world means nothing if you can’t map it into a story that means something to the big guys upstairs (C-Suit). Creating a report for yourself drives your day to day and week to week. As the social media manager, you’re able to look at a lot of data and make it make sense. You’re able to look at the finite numbers and see if these are helping your team accomplish the company’s overall goals. Your data might be recorded in a spread sheet that you can update day to day and see the details of the analytics you’re tracking. A weekly report might also be framed in a spread sheet of some kind but needs to be less nuanced. Assuming this report will be seen by your boss it should be more general and a little less specific. The further up the latter you go the more concise you want your presentation to be. Understanding the overall goals for the company will help drive the story your report will tell. Knowing this will help channel what metrics need to be included in the presentation because you have to be the interpreter for what all that data means.

Keep your reports short and to the point with more graphics telling the story rather than just numbers. Analyze the platform briefly and share the strategy from the past month to reach the company goals. Next, include metrics that indicate how the strategy worked overtime, meaning use rates and percentages. Share what worked, what were the wins from the past month. Explain how you’re planning on using the things that didn’t work to inform your plans for the next month. It’s also important to show what opportunities are presenting themselves in the next month as well and how those opportunities will be woven into the upcoming plans.

So whether you like vanilla, chocolate or pistachio pudding you better have the right ingredients to make it delicious. In other words snazzy reporting will help make your metaphorical pudding a success.