You’re “wrapping up” the last few days of 2013, and we know your boss is looking for you to show you’ve been successful in social this year. As you think ahead to January (and your yearly performance review), what metrics will you need to “present” to her?
We’ve created this template to help you prepare for your review and show your brand’s social media success for 3 primary marketing objectives: raising awareness of your brand or company, increasing loyalty or affinity for your brand, and driving traffic to your website. In this blog post, we’ll walk you through how to use the template and why the metrics we’ve highlighted matter. Of course, we know every one of you will have slightly different objectives for social media marketing, so feel free to edit and customize this Excel document for your own use—use it as a jumping-off point to impress your higher-ups!
Here’s a quick outline of what you’ll find in each section of the template: the metrics and why they matter.
Awareness Metrics:
Use this tab of your report to show how much your audience has grown in 2013. We’ve put an emphasis on metrics that calculate the change in the size of your audience rather than pure numbers. Why? A raw number like the number of Likes on your Facebook page doesn’t tell you much on its own—you could be a brand working in a niche market with a small potential audience and small number of fans, or a huge consumer brand with hundreds of thousands of customers and even more fans. Showing the growth in these metrics year-over-year reflects what you’ve done as a social media marketer to grow that audience and improve your brand’s chance to reach your target audience on each platform.
We’ve also included a section you can use to highlight influencer-specific outreach you’ve done. Include links to tweets or blog posts you’ve secured through your influencer marketing plans and make note of how big their audience is—more impressions for your brand = more opportunities to generate awareness, with the added bonus of 3rd-party validation!
Use audience demographics to share the breakdown of fans/followers or people who mentioned you in categories that are relevant to your brand. B2B brands may want to use data points like level and industry, and B2C brands may be more interested in seeing the gender and age breakdowns. Customize this section to give your boss a sense of who your brand has reached this year.
Loyalty & Affinity Metrics:
In this section, the metrics we’ve included will show how engaged people are with your brand across social media platforms and whether they’re talking about you in a positive or negative way. Highlight your sentiment score for this year and compare it to last year in order to show how you’ve sparked more positive conversation or controlled potential crises that could have resulted in negative sentiment.
The engagement metrics we’ve listed should be customized to reflect your specific goals and objectives, but overall you’ll want to show an increase in total numbers and average engagement for posts made on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. Specifically, look for Likes, Shares, Comments, RTs, Favorites, Replies, and more—you may need to dig into historical data for some of these platforms to capture all of the metrics you need. If you haven’t been tracking them, do the next best thing and show results from the last 90 days.
Traffic Metrics:
Not every brand will have traffic-related goals, but you’ll want to pay special attention to this section if you’re a B2B brand, an e-commerce company, or if you’re using microsites to promote company initiatives or campaigns. We’ve included a place for you to record social-referred traffic to your website, blog, and marketing landing pages, but you’ll want to customize this for specific pages or sites you’ve promoted through social this year. Not promoting a blog or landing pages? Feel free to remove those sections entirely.
The metrics in this tab can be found using Google Analytics or a marketing automation vendor, so you’ll need to make sure you have access to those tools before you attempt to complete it. Basically, you’re measuring the increase in social-referred traffic as well as social-referred goal completions (if you’ve set those up in your dashboard) over last year. For a more in-depth look, check out platform-specific breakdowns to see which social sources performed best for you and which ones you should pump up the effort on next year.
Questions about where to find these metrics or how to present them in the best possible way to your boss? Leave us a comment and we’ll make sure you’re ready for that performance review!
Interested in even more ways to win in social during the last few days of 2013? Sign up for uberVU’s Season of Social to receive a custom brand report powered by uberVU, plus free social media tips, guides and festive content to help you end the year on a high note.