February 28, 2022
Are you getting questions from the boardroom around the impact and value of social media? Are you being challenged on your reporting? In today’s blog, we’re discussing again how to prove the value of social media to your organisation, taking you deeper into the subject and exploring the measurements your boardroom wants to see.
Through our experience on social, we’ve identified that the key to successful measurement is three D’s: data, dialogue, direction. The data can come in different types and metrics. Looking at social listening data first will show you what conversations are being spoken about. It will give you insights into the intrigue and the questions that are arising out in the marketplace. It will also show you what’s not being spoken about, where there are opportunities to own conversations. Lastly, it will show you the competitive conversations happening, and how companies are reaching and engaging with your audiences and your customers.
And then there’s native data. The biggest question is: should you be using vanity metrics, or should you be using sanity metrics? Well, at immediate future, we say you need both and here’s why. Your vanity metrics, or your social resonance metrics, such as impressions, reach, engagements, video views are just the thumbs up that your content is working. If you are basing your entire social measurement purely on likes, reach, and impression, your boardroom might start rolling their eyes because they’re not tangible or business impacting metrics, but they are signals that your content is adding value.
Moving onto the second key measurement – the dialogue. It needs to make sense of what the data are telling us, good, bad, or indifferent. And don’t be afraid to learn from mistakes – the boardrooms will welcome that. Sometimes some of the mistakes that we make in our marketing are the biggest educators for how we can make a success of things.
Last, but not least – direction. If you really want to get to marketing qualified leads and, in turn, sales qualified leads, there needs to be some direction with the board about what you’re doing, what you want to do, and how long it’s going to take. The demand generation focus has brought an age where people think social media is an immediate returns space. It’s not. These are not salespeople in a room with warm leads. Social media is the opportunity to create a series of people who are interested in your brand or proposition who will likely have future spending. But particularly if you’re a high-value proposition, they are not there today to trade. They’re there to learn about the solutions that you can bring to them, the problems you can solve for them.
Our Managing Director Colin Jacobs was live on Serious Social a few months back covering this very topic. If you want to find out more insights, watch the full video here.