Data is the driving force behind every major marketing decision. As pro social media marketers, it’s your job to bring meaning to the numbers and turn them into something useful. To help you get it right, we gathered a panel of leading communicators, hosted by Katelyn Brower – Director of Public Relations, Social Media, and Events at First Advantage – and featuring insights from:

Read on for top takeaways on identifying key metrics, optimizing your strategy through experimentation frameworks, and transforming marketing mis-steps into growth opportunities (and much more besides…).

How to Determine Which Metrics Matter Most

Given the vast differences between audiences, behaviors, industries, and objectives, it’s hard to come up with a one-size-fits-all rule for identifying the “best” social media metrics to target and track. So where do you start?

For Kate at Candid, the most important thing is to address your organization and team-level goals. One of Candid’s big goals right now is to help nonprofits secure funding in a challenging political landscape. To measure this in a social media context, she looks at content saves and shares. “I want to know that people are coming back to this content and that they’re sharing it with other people.”

Amanda at McDonald’s agrees: “You first have to ask yourself what is the objective for your team and your company.”

For McDonald’s, the goal is to be the biggest brand in culture. To achieve that, Amanda’s team needs to drive reach and social conversation, so they’ve historically focused on engagement rate. But now they’re prioritizing shareability.

“We need to move people from simply liking a post, to feeling compelled to share something,” Amanda explains. “There is a direct correlation to reach when we’re seeing a higher share ratio.”

(Psssst we included McDonald’s in our roundup of 17 of the Best Brand Storytelling Campaigns – see who else made the list!)

Meanwhile, Laura at the American Cancer Society points out that you don’t need to target the same rigid KPIs month-in, month-out. Instead, you can switch up your metrics depending on specific campaign objectives. “Some of our campaigns may be acquisition-heavy, in which case our main KPI is going to shift away from engagement rate into something like conversions, landings on site, or making a donation,” she explains. “So I would say the biggest thing is to be agile.”

Using Data to Shape Long-Term Brand Strategy

Once you’ve identified the most impactful metrics to track, you can start using the data you gather to inform big-picture strategic decisions.

Kate encourages marketers to view social media not just as a broadcast channel, but as the place where you can find the most up-to-date audience insights. The challenge, she insists, lies in expanding your insights from campaign-level to brand-level – and her solution is to destroy them with data. “I like to have a lot of data on the table. And then when brand conversations come up, I say, ‘This conversation’s getting a lot of attention. Have we thought about writing an article or making a toolkit?’”

At McDonald’s, Amanda says social media is the go-to place for data mining and insight, describing it as a “giant focus group.” So much so that almost all of the fast food giant’s tentpole campaigns are now inspired by something someone posted on social.

Take their Adult Happy Meal collab with Cactus Plant Flea Market, which stemmed from a post insisting that you’re never too old to have a Happy Meal.

Still, that doesn’t mean every conversation about your brand should be the basis for a campaign, Amanda adds. “You don’t need to move on everything. We have a treasure trove of data and insights that we back pocket for the right moment. But every single day we’re learning something new. “

🤓 Further reading: Viral and Cultural Moments: How and When Brands Should Tap into the Conversation

The Evolution of Social Media Teams

As data becomes ever more important to campaign success and strategic direction, social media teams have had to adapt fast. So what does a high-performing social team look like today – and how will it evolve to meet future demands?

For Amanda, it’s all about being real-time. This means identifying new trends and conversations on a daily basis, rather than only mining for data at specific times of the year.

“I really want my team to be the go-to source for social listening,” she explains. “That way, when we get asked ad hoc ‘What are you seeing in this space?’ or ‘Can you give me any insights on what people think about this product?’, we’re ready to go because we have that real-time monitoring in place.”

Laura adds that you should never underestimate the role of community managers. “Let that person or that discipline be your best friend, they’re sitting on immediate feedback that no other channel can provide.”

Tailoring Your Data Strategy Across Platforms

What works on Instagram might not play so well on Facebook or YouTube. So how do you adjust your data strategy for different platforms with different algorithms and audience behaviors?

Laura stresses that strategy and intent should always come first, regardless of platform. “Don’t try to retroactively fit data into your campaign. It should be done upfront and drive how we’re going to market.”

She also urges marketers to consider channel-specific nuances. Just because Facebook and Insta both exist within the Meta universe, you can’t afford to treat them the same. “In Instagram alone, you have so many different types of content units. You’re not looking at engagement because it looks so different for Instagram Stories than for Reels or in-feed content.”

Kate agrees that you should be using data to inform your strategic plans then implementing and reviewing what worked. But she also stresses that creating a strategy document isn’t a one-and-done exercise – that’s just not how social media works.

For example, remember when LinkedIn shrank the size of link preview images for organic posts?

Image source

This happened at a time when Kate and her team were focused on driving traffic from social to the Candid website, so they were focusing on link clicks as a key metric. Unsurprisingly, those new tiny preview images put a major dent in clicks on LinkedIn, so they quickly had to switch up their strategy.

“We made sure that that was part of the data story,” she explains. “Here’s why we had to shift what we were doing; here’s why there’s this weird dip in May after seeing so much growth.”

How to Communicate Performance to Leadership (Effectively)

We all know that leaders sometimes fixate on vanity metrics – and that those metrics aren’t always the best way to measure the success of a social strategy or campaign.

That’s why Amanda stresses the importance of controlling the narrative by marketing the marketing and socializing your wins. For example, every month, her team shares a social performance scorecard featuring everything she wants leadership to know in terms of…

👉 Performance vs monthly and annual targets

👉 Which posts are performing (and under-performing)

“It’s one thing to always wanna show the best, but at the end of the day, we have to be honest with ourselves – it’s the only way we’re going to continue to grow and evolve.”

Laura also uses monthly scorecards, skewed toward what leaders at the American Cancer Society want to see.

As such, share of voice has become a major focus. Because social media changes so fast, it doesn’t always make sense for Laura’s team to look at year-on-year comparisons around key moments like October’s Breast Cancer Awareness Month – so, instead, they measure how many people are mentioning or quoting the American Cancer Society in related conversations. “It’s important for us to look at the entire picture and how we’re measuring that.”

Meanwhile, Kate points out that the definition of a “vanity metric” will vary from one organization to the next, and that they shouldn’t automatically be avoided. For instance, while follower count is often dismissed, it’s actually a useful data point for nonprofits, because it speaks to an account’s reach – which, in turn, can help you land a grant.

“It’s not a vanity metric if you can use it,” she insists. “It’s only a vanity metric if you’re like, ’ooh, big number’, and that’s your only takeaway.”

Learning From Underperforming Campaigns

While no one likes it when campaigns flop, it’s not all bad news, because you can take key learnings that improve your future campaigns.

Kate is a big fan of running experiments because they give you the space to fail. As such, she admits that Candid has done “a lot of different things that have failed” over the years. But one that sticks in her mind is a campaign comparing weird animal facts to Candid’s own activity levels – like squirrels collect 10,000 nuts a year; Candid collects data on 1.9 million nonprofits a year.

“It failed completely. It was crickets.”

However, they created Instagram Stories versions of these posts featuring short videos of the animals alongside the statistics, and they performed super well. This led Kate to realize that the substance of the campaign wasn’t the problem – rather, it was about how they presented the data.

Of course, not all Candid’s experiments “fail.” Kate notes that they started hearing more and more comments from people wanting to see data on the nonprofit sector as a whole rather than just Candid, which encouraged them to experiment with educational carousels like this one:

 

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A post shared by Candid (@candiddotorg)

“Those have been by far our most popular content ever. We looked at that combination of the quantitative and the qualitative and used that to design our next experiment.”

What’s Next in Social Media Data?

To help understand where to go from here, our panelists shared one data capability or mindset shift you should adopt in the next couple years.

Laura urges marketers to redefine what we consider “social.” Rather than focusing solely on traditional channels like Facebook and Instagram, look at any platform that enables two-way conversation. “Podcasts, for example – what are the reviews people are leaving? Are people talking about something that you should care about that impacts your brand?”

Finally, Kate says we should be talking more about time – from the time it takes to collect and interpret data to creating content and managing a community. “The most precious thing that we have is our time,” she explains. “And if you don’t have the time, you can’t take on the project. Everyone needs to be aware of this, especially as we have more platforms, more data points, more everything to track.”

Want to learn more about using data to level up your social media strategy? Sign up for one of our upcoming social media conferences.

Featured image by Freepik.

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