We’re excited to announce our first version of an online bootcamp, which is a self-paced email course that’ll walk you through the metrics that matter for each communication channel that your brand is on. We’ll specifically dive into email, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and YouTube. At the end of this eight-part series, you’ll have enough information to ensure that your annual goals include the metrics that matter most to your brand.
Throughout the weeks, we’ll be diving into each social media platform to reveal available metrics and help you find your perfect metrics. If you’d like to get these posts delivered to your inbox as a series, you can click below to sign up. We’ll even add in some extra exercises that you’ll only get via email to ensure your success.
Before we get started, let’s talk about some core principles that should guide you throughout your journey of gathering meaningful metrics.
Less is More
Ever hear the saying that “If you measure everything, you’re actually measuring nothing?” Well, it’s definitely true and especially in the world of social media where pretty much any stat you can ask for is available with a click of a mouse.
Over the years we’ve worked with many companies that tend to track every stat you can think of just because they can (or they think they should). They spend hours every week crunching the numbers and they even tend to boast about what they track and how much time it takes them. However, when we ask them, “Is there anything you’ve learned?” or “Have you made any changes as a result of doing this analysis?,” they unfortunately cannot point to a single change or insight gained.
Countless hours are spent compiling and averaging metrics that don’t inform social media programming and engagement strategies and let’s be clear. This is wasted time. It’s more important than ever to decide what metrics matter most to your brand. Otherwise you’ll be swimming in all of the wrong metrics with nothing to help improve your programming and engagement on each channel.
This series is about ensuring you don’t do any of these things. Life is too short to spend time on things that don’t matter and in the social media world, wouldn’t you rather spend that time brainstorming innovative and fun content ideas for your audience or making an educator’s day as a result of your engagement?
Start from the Top
Most brands have a multi-year strategic plan and an annual operational plan, which states the company’s planned initiatives and expected results. Departments then tend to form their goals from these plans and this may come in various formats, OKRs, KPIs etc. Whatever your department goals are, we suggest you always start here. Examine these goals and identify where exactly your social media efforts fall into. For example, if one of your company’s goals is to generate brand awareness within a new or existing audience, you will prioritize metrics that have to do with reach, such as impressions and unique impressions. If your company is just starting to put more effort into increasing your social media presence, we suggest you stick to top-of-the-funnel brand-awareness goals and as your presence matures, you can begin to form goals that move down the marketing funnel, such as generating interest in your product through engagement goals, and eventually more conversion-focused goals, such as leads and revenue.
Value First
If you know anything about us, you know we’ll never write a blog post without talking about value. The point of all of this is to ensure that you can provide the most value to your audience as you possibly can through what you post and how you engage. Remember -- the more value your posts provide your audience, the more awareness and engagement your brand gains, which can translate into referral traffic and eventually increased revenue (which is not the ultimate goal of social media, but I get that your bosses may think that).
How do you begin to understand what your audience values most? That, my friend, is what we’ll teach you in this series. So hold onto your hats and get excited to learn how to translate data into insights that can directly inform your programming and engagement strategies.
Choose
Given the ridiculous amount of data available on each social media platform, we’ll only highlight the type of data that generally provides the most insight. This is not a one-size-fits-all approach though and since every brand is unique and may have different goals, we’ve provided some options to choose from but the goal is that you should “choose” and not be inundated with the endless metrics provided.
Throughout the weeks, we’ll be diving into each social media platform to reveal available metrics and help you find your way to your perfect metrics. If you’d like to get these posts delivered to your inbox as a series, you can click below to sign up. We’ll even add in some extra exercises that you’ll only get via email to ensure your success.
Social Media Metrics Bootcamp Post Series