The 5 Essential SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING REPORTS

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1 The 5 Essential SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING REPORTS

2 Introduction How often do you review the data generated by your social campaigns? As a busy social media manager, you need to be efficient with the time you spend reporting on your social efforts. You likely need to gather and review data for yourself, your team, and other departments. In this guide, we ll take you through the five most impactful and essential report types for your social marketing program, explaining how to use each one, who is your intended audience, when to produce it, and much more How to Pick Your Report Type Is the report for your team or to communicate with people outside of your team? Yes Team Is it for a big campaign? No Others Is it for a big campaign? Yes No Campaign Ops Report Are you setting goals? Campaign Debrief ROI Report Yes No Goal Setting Report Social Team Ops Report The 5 Essential Social Media Marketing Reports 2

3 What Do You Want? The best metrics you can report are ones that map to your team s or your company s overall goals. We interviewed hundreds of Simply Measured customers and wrapped up their input into the following five common objectives of social media marketing. Then, for each objective, we ve put together typical metrics that would appear in a report and questions they should answer. Increase Brand Awareness and Loyalty Audience Growth How much are you seeing your audience grow, periodover-period? Which kind of activities, paid and unpaid, are resulting in audience bumps? Mentions How many mentions are you receiving? What exactly are people saying around your brand? Conversation Share How does your brand stack up to competitors when it comes to conversations happening on social, network by network? Sentiment on Mentions People are mentioning you all the time on social. That s great. But, are they smiling or sneering? Become an Industry Thought Leader Content Shares How many people are sharing your content? Is a certain type of content more likely to get shared by your audience than other content? Shares by Influencers Who are your industry s influencers? How are they getting people to engage with your social media content? How can you best partner with them? Increase Lead Generation Site Traffic from Social Is your social audience transforming into a customer base? Which efforts are driving traffic to your site, and how can you boost this traffic? Visits by Social Channel Which specific social networks are driving the most visits to your site? How does this change over time and on a campaign-by-campaign basis? The 5 Essential Social Media Marketing Reports 3

4 Increase Community Engagement Engagement as % of Audience How active is your social audience? What kind of engagement do you get now, and how can you amplify this engagement? Influencer Engagement How do influencer activities on social affect engagement levels with your content and social accounts? Which influencers both partners and non-partners are making a difference when it comes to building engagement for your brand? Improve Customer Service Response Time How long does it take your brand to respond to customer queries, complaints, and compliments? How does this average stack up to competitors? % of Fan Wall Posts with Brand Replies Are you doing a good job of responding to as many engaged members of your social audience as possible? How can you begin benchmarking your efforts here? The 5 Essential Social Media Marketing Reports 4

5 Your Most Essential Reports Now that we ve shared our list of objectives, which we figure you either are or will likely report on at some point, it s time to get into the details on the five reports we suggest you prepare to address different aspects of them. #1 THE TACTIC REPORT Report Specifics Audience for This Report: Community managers Purpose: Monitoring tactic performance Interval: Hourly or daily, depending on volume of data Analysis Time: minutes max, preferably less Typical Metrics: Metrics about specific audience actions or activities, such as impressions, shares, Likes, Retweets, and a list of top performing posts Context: Used for your biggest and most important events and campaigns Extra Credit: Include progress toward a larger, overall goal, such as lead generation through content downloads or greater sales on your website As you move into a major social marketing push, you need a method of knowing how your strategies are performing so you can adjust and optimize where needed. Depending on the breadth and volume of your social audience tally and typical engagement levels, you might need daily or hourly reporting. For example, if you have a large, active audience, you ll want to keep track of their ups and downs on a daily, or even more regular, basis to notice shifts in behavior. With an audience you re trying to nab for the first time, you can probably report on activity and engagement by day or week. This chart from the Simply Measured Instagram Hashtag Report depicts one brand s mentions on an hourly basis during its campaign launch day. The 5 Essential Social Media Marketing Reports 5

6 The first priority for these report types is to help your community managers identify successes they can repeat and opportunities for improvement while the campaign is actually going on. By delivering operational reports on a regular basis and giving your tactical team access to the results, you empower them to make informed decisions mid-campaign, identify errors before they become crises, and modulate paid efforts as needed. Pro Tip Developing personas is a crucial social marketing practice. Understanding how various audience segments interact, amplify, and ultimately become customers is essential to any sophisticated social strategy. Don t stop at demographic data. Take a look at which content is resonating with your audience. By looking at engagement data, at a page level, or by tagging content and grouping by various personas, you can round out the picture of where and how users interact with your brand, and what you should spend more time doing. The 5 Essential Social Media Marketing Reports 6

7 #2 THE CAMPAIGN DEBRIEF Report Specifics Audience for This Report: Executives and other departments Purpose: Communicating overall performance of campaigns and reasons for bumps/spikes along the way Interval: One-time. Can be run for campaign s entirety and/ or for smaller time frames where particular activity bursts took place and require closer observation. Analysis Time: 1-2 hours Typical Metrics: Activity totals, such as frequency of posting, stats on content types, response on certain channels to content, as well as comparisons to previous years or campaigns performance and the original goals for the campaign Context: Used for the most important events and campaigns Extra Credit: Include performance relative to overall departmental or company goals After you ve completed a big social media push, you need to communicate how it went to others in your organization. Depending on the length of your campaign, you may need just one report covering the event time period, or you might need to dial in more specifically to weekly or daily time periods to see what went well and what went not-so-well. This megaphone from the Simply Measured Twitter Account Report gives an overall sense of how one brand s campaign went from start to finish. The 5 Essential Social Media Marketing Reports 7

8 Pro Tip The priority for these reports is helping upper management and other departments understand your team s performance overall, with context. Tell them what you wanted to accomplish, why, and how well you did. You ll want to give these groups a report that is more high-level and easy to scan than the report you d create for your team. Impress your manager by giving him or her not just the what, but the why. Instead of providing a simple We ve gained 2,000 followers in the month of May so far, show him or her a chart over time, and offer context. This chart from the Simply Measured Twitter Account Report shows how and when one brand s follower count grew. For instance, with the chart above in hand, you could say: In the past two months, we ve gained 2,000 followers. See where Followers Added peaks? That was the day we started the campaign on Twitter and got some pickup from Good Morning America. There s some lull in Followers Added the next day, as we expected, but we re debuting our next campaign on Monday to pick our Followers Added count back up again. The 5 Essential Social Media Marketing Reports 8

9 #3 THE ADJUSTMENT REPORT Report Specifics Audience for This Report: Community manager and/or social media manager Purpose: Tactical, for strategy adjustment Interval: Weekly or monthly Analysis Time: 30 minutes Typical Metrics: Change from previous period, progress toward goals Context: Used as a regular check-in Extra Credit: Include competitors performance during similar campaign or same time period Most social teams are running multiple campaigns at a time. You should be regularly evaluating performance over a certain time period so you can adjust and modify your strategies to meet long-term goals. The priority for these reports is understanding progress at a regular cadence. This chart from the Simply Measured Cross-Channel Social Performance Report compares one week s engagement to the previous week s engagement. Whatever this brand did the most recent week, it worked. The 5 Essential Social Media Marketing Reports 9

10 Pro Tip This report type boils down to answering one question: Are we on track to hit our goals? Whether you want the answer for yourself or need to deliver it to higher-ups, this report is a must-have. Your weekly report should operate the same way a piece of content would: like a funnel. This chart from one brand s Cross-Channel Social Performance Report shows the engagement its content received broken down by post type and channel. Start large, with a complete snapshot overview of your social health and trends from across all your key social channels. Then, you can dive into more specific, post-level insights or KPIs you re tracking. The 5 Essential Social Media Marketing Reports 10

11 #4 THE GOAL-SETTING REPORT Report Specifics Audience for This Report: Your department Purpose: Set strategic goals. Identify which tactics will help the team achieve its goals. Interval: Monthly or quarterly Analysis Time: 2-4 hours Typical Metrics: Period-over-period change in engagement, social audience size, and growth percentages. Context: Used to define benchmarks to assist in setting goals and broad tactics for the next period Extra Credit: Use competitors past period-over-period performance to inform your goals and benchmarks Goal-setting reports look at whether goals for the past period were achieved, and are used to set goals for the next month or quarter. They often include information that helps identify which tactics are worthy of reuse and which aren t. This chart comes from the Simply Measured Cross-Channel Social Performance Report. In goal-setting reports, consider both your past owned and earned social media efforts to inform either reasonable or ambitions planning. The 5 Essential Social Media Marketing Reports 11

12 Pro Tip This report type focuses on answering one burning question: How can my brand set appropriate goals for the future? This information helps you plan and execute better by looking at previous surges, growth rates, and other benchmarks. If you have specific metrics you re reaching for each week, month, or quarter, it s much easier to address the impact you ve made. If your goal has been to drive more traffic to your blog from Twitter, focus on those click-thrus. This chart comes from the Simply Measured Cross-Channel Social Performance Report. In goal-setting reports, consider how your efforts on different social channels compare as you go about planning. This component of your report should focus on easy-to-track numbers so that you can give week-over-week summaries of how well you ve done, and what might be missing. The 5 Essential Social Media Marketing Reports 12

13 #5 THE ROI REPORT Report Specifics Audience for This Report: Other departments and executives Purpose: Communicate performance and support department budget requests Interval: Quarterly or yearly Analysis Time: 1-2 hours Typical Metrics: Goals achieved measured alongside social budget allocated Context: Used to communicate successes and setbacks to executive team Extra Credit: Identify and compare your ROI to competitors ROI In these reports, the goal is to communicate return on investment to the people who determine the budget in your organization. Because ROI reports are used to support budget decisions, it s worthwhile to spend time determining what social ROI means to your organization, in particular, and surfacing the metrics that are relevant to your definition of ROI. These ROI-related metrics could include moving social users to a landing page on your website or simply growing the number of shares of certain types of content, like promotions for sales. This chart comes from the Simply Measured Facebook Insights with Ads Report. C-levels execs aren t necessarily interested in every detail of your social outcomes. They want to know what they got for their dollars and what they re likely to get with additional spend. The 5 Essential Social Media Marketing Reports 13

14 Pro Tip This ROI report answers two common questions for executives, What are we getting out of our social presence? and How should we invest in the future? This kind of report helps you define what ROI is on social and show how you re delivering value by increasing brand awareness, making further progress on becoming a thought leader in your field, increasing lead generation and community engagement, and even improving customer service efforts. When setting up your strategy and developing a plan to measure ROI, there are four key areas to focus your benchmarking: 1. Aspirational Benchmarking Learning from social leaders. 2. Trended Benchmarking Setting goals, projections, and standards based on previous activity. 3. Earned Benchmarking Comparing campaign or promotional efforts against a standard for success. 4. Competitive Benchmarking Setting goals and baselines for performance and growth based on your direct competitors. Each of these benchmarks will require different tactics, metrics to focus on, and level of detail. The 5 Essential Social Media Marketing Reports 14

15 Conclusion As social media matures, it becomes more important to evaluate your efforts so you can help your brand grow and prove the worth of your efforts. By following your progress during campaigns, reviewing key metrics afterwards, and tying your success to company ROI, you re taking a sophisticated and honest approach to your social media marketing. Having a solid reporting plan means that you can explain why your work is important, know when it s time to regroup, and, most importantly, when it s time to celebrate. Lori is the only Ph.D. epidemiologist (that s code for population health scientist) she knows working in digital marketing. She s been working with data for more than 15 years and loves designing custom reports on the Simply Measured Professional Services team. She s been known to jump up and down when she gets to work on projects that make data easier to understand and more useful for our customers. It s adorable. The 5 Essential Social Media Marketing Reports 15

16 Social Analytics Framework Reporting at Every Step Our social analytics framework below highlights the essential components of the process that enables marketers to plan and measure their social programs. Building useful, regularly scheduled reports helps marketers set themselves up for success. The 5 Essential Social Media Marketing Reports 16

17 About Simply Measured Simply Measured is the most complete social analytics solution, empowering marketers with unmatched access to their social data to more clearly define their social strategy and to optimize their tactics for maximum impact. Our goal is to put the tools to understand business data in the hands of business users. We think reporting should be simple, attractive, and accessible for everyone not just data scientists. Our software streamlines the process from data to deliverables and eliminates the countless hours spent on everyday reporting tasks. We do this by putting cloud data sources at your fingertips, providing a marketplace of best practice reports, and allowing you to generate beautiful solutions on the web, in Excel, and in PowerPoint with a couple of clicks. Want to try Simply Measured? Request a Free Trial Today Copyright Simply Measured, Inc. All Rights Reserved.