Measure It!

6 min readOct 31, 2020

Explain the importance of social media analytics. What metrics would you include in these three different types of reports: daily for yourself, weekly for your immediate boss, and monthly for your company’s management team?

Measuring your social media brand makes or breaks its success and effectiveness in this busy digital age. Capitalizing on your social media means knowing its analytics and how to react based on results.

Social media analytics crucially contributes to your brand. Understanding why a strategy works or how to enhance your strategy to gain more engagement is key. Social media analytics helps you understand your audience, their age, demographic, and psychographic providing the ability to create content that tailors to what your audience wants. Analytics also shows you what is working and not working, if you are reaching your business goals, and demonstrates the impact on your business. These measurements gain upper management attention and approval by proving social media’s worth, explaining how it saves money, increasing engagement, and showing if their business needs to shift its thought to align better with demands. It provides feedback on your ability to reach an audience, increase conversions, and hit your goals, allowing you to readjust the strategy in real-time.

The metrics measured for each platform can be specified by the stage of reporting: daily for yourself, weekly for your immediate boss, or monthly for the company’s management team. Below are what I believe are the most important metrics for each stage:

Daily Reporting — Self Awareness

Daily reporting is the best for understanding what kind of content to create and for who. These metrics encourage immediate changes because you see quick results that can be used to your advantage. It is important to know your audience metrics and how it can shift daily as well as how they engage with your content. This leads to the number of impressions and reaches for your post. Engagement tells what your audience cares about, how they communicate, and when they engage. This important daily report gives the ability to change content on the fly, aligning posts with what the audience wants. Finally, I think the most important metric for daily reporting is the listening metric because it’s knowing what people think about your brand. You find who mentions your brand and if they have positive or negative feelings about the brand. Listening gets you into the mind of people and the why behind their feelings towards brands. It allows you to change tactics to become more favorable in the public eye.

Weekly Reporting — To the Boss

When you send weekly reports for your boss there needs to be more in-depth detail about how the account is doing. Your boss cares about the daily trends but they want to see growth week-to-week on the account and toward business objectives. The top metrics I would start with are awareness through impressions, reach, and engagement. This shows your boss that over time not only is your content catching the attention of the audience but also enticing them to communicate with the brand. This is important for understanding the growth of the brand over time and tells if the content is connecting with consumers in a way they care. Then there is share of voice (SOV) through volume, sentiment, and competitor analysis. Reporting SOV demonstrates how much online sphere the brand has a hold of, are they the most talked about, and are those conversations about the brand positive, negative, or neutral. SOV is a great analysis for comparing a brand to its competition and knowing where they stand in relevance and market share. This gives your boss an understanding of what the brand is doing right and what can be worked on for future campaigns. Another strong weekly report is customer care and the response rate and time that consumers are answered. This demonstrates the difference between an attentive brand who cares about their consumers’ needs and a brand that doesn’t care. If done correctly this increases engagement and positive comments and reviews. Finally, if the brand has a website, social trafficking would be essential. It reports how many people found the site based on social media and the specific platform. It demonstrates how social media can bring the masses to your site and it’s a great way to find your niche audience and create a strategy to post more content to that specific platform.

SOV = BRAND METRIC / TOTAL MARKET METRIC X 100

Monthly — C-Suite

The company’s management team can be the easiest or hardest people to provide monthly reports to since not everyone is seeking the same information. They like to keep things short, easy to follow, and focused on the goals of the organization. Most management teams want to see the bottom line, what is social media doing to improve our business and reach our goals? The best metric to present is ROI because these people love the numbers! ROI demonstrates conversions or how many sales came from the account, referrals, or even how much money was saved by using social media compared to advertising by using Social Equivalent Ad Value. They may also be interested in Net Promoter Score which indicates the strength of the brand and how likely someone will recommend the brand to others. Customer Care is also important; customers are the asset behind any successful business. Taking care of the customer translates into positive engagement, recommendations, and future sales. Finally, they will want to know about social media management which encompasses all of the information above. Who is doing what? Why do we need them? How much money will it cost? How does it accomplish the overall business goals? Understanding how to answer these major questions through data is imperative when speaking to the higher-ups about why they need you.

Data is the root of all success. There has never been a person in history with a successful business who doesn’t focus on data. Social media is up and coming and essential in understanding business success in this new era.