Measuring social media ROI is notoriously tricky.

Indeed, just 8% of marketers say they’re “not at all concerned” about the return generated by their social media activities, according to research from Hootsuite:

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And it becomes even more difficult when we move away from paid strategies and focus on organic social media measurement (let alone when we consider how to integrate organic and paid social). But attributing concrete results to organic content doesn’t need to be a headache, because there are practical steps you can take to gauge and demonstrate the overall health of your social media channels.

Get it right by leveraging the organic social media measurement funnel:

Read on to learn what it is, how it works, and how you can use it in measuring your organic social performance.

Internal Team Performance Measurement

👉 How often to measure it: Annually or bi-annually

Measuring the performance of your internal team is a key focus for social media leaders, such as digital marketing directors and VPs, helping to inform strategic investment in your social media program and resources.

To leverage this form of measurement, you’ll want to consider:

• Which social media platforms and content types you use – and how they’re performing
• Who you’re “enabling” across the business (e.g. content submitters, social teams, employee advocates, etc)

Also, don’t overlook the impact of employee advocacy. Per LinkedIn, employee networks have 10X the connections as company profiles, while posts from employees drive a 30% upturn in their employer’s total engagement. But with just 3% of employees currently sharing content about their company, there’s clearly scope for improvement.

With that in mind, you should also answer the following questions to measure the overall health of your social media strategy:

• What are the signup and adoption rates of your employee advocacy program?
• How many employee shares are you generating?
• How much reach (or how many impressions) are you generating from employee posts?

Overall Social Platform Health Measurement

👉 How often to measure it: Bi-weekly or weekly (or even daily if you generate a large volume of content and engagement and/or you work for a high-profile brand)

Assessing the overall health of your social platforms helps social media teams to gather the necessary data and insights to inform future reporting requests, as well as helping you identify signals that require further investigation.

For example, when you see a big spike – or, worse, a massive drop – in a specific key performance indicator, that should be your signal to dig deeper and find out what’s going on. Is there an opportunity for you to exploit here, or a crisis you need to solve?

This part of the measurement funnel also helps you:

• Identify potential gaps in your social media strategy or content that need filling
• Provide wider context in conversations with stakeholders across the business
• Discover team opportunities to annotate what’s happening right now, so you can reference it in later conversations – like “what’s the deal with that engagement rate dip in January?”

To measure overall social platform health, you should create two dashboards:

• Bird’s eye view: An overall snapshot of channel performance, filtered by social network.
• Deep dive: Analysis of individual social network performance, filtered by social media tag (g. topic, content type, product, etc)

🤓 Pro tip: Ensure the data built into your dashboards speaks to the most common questions that your leadership team asks about social media performance. If they’re obsessed with the size of your audience, you’d better include metrics like follower growth and total reach/impressions.

Strategic Adjustments Measurement

👉 How often to measure it: Every 4 – 6 weeks

Strategic adjustments are a valuable measurement tool for your core collaborators – think content and creative teams, field and event marketers, and employer brand teams. This measurement approach helps you to:

• Report insights by platform, content pillar, and/or asset type
• Improve understanding of set objectives vs achieved objectives (plus related insights)
• Inform strategic shifts and content creation practices for specific networks

Bear in mind that, as a general rule, you can expect to deliver one genuine action from engaged users who see your social content. For instance…

So it’s essential you define the specific objective you’re trying to achieve and how you’re going to measure it.

Once you’ve figured out the practicalities, it’s time to consider how to structure your report.

For each of your dedicated social networks, you might start by displaying your primary KPI – e.g. engagement rate, impressions, follower growth, etc – versus your predefined benchmark, followed by two or three bullet points explaining the context behind your results: what drove those outcomes? Then add a further one or two bullet points pulling out key learnings and next actions based on those learnings. You should also take the time to highlight the performance of any boosted posts during the reporting period.

Or, if you’re providing commentary on a specific platform or content type, you might also want to discuss wider trends across the network in question – as well as diving deeper into the performance of your target objective. What did you hope to achieve, and what actually happened?

Where relevant, you should also take the time to share more granular data points, like the volume of posts and engagement rate of different asset types (whitepapers, blog posts, webinars, etc).

Core KPIs Measurement

👉 How often to measure it: Quarterly

Core KPIs help your CMO and other members of the marketing leadership team to understand the overall success of your social media program as it relates to your organization’s primary marketing goals.

Because leaders are time-poor, it’s in your best interests to present this information in a way that’s easy to digest. Do this by creating your own “digital index”, in which each KPI you target is assigned a weighting based on:

• Historical performance
• Program invest
• Expected year-on-year growth
• Direct business impact (e. metrics that sit further down the marketing funnel should have a higher weighting)

Bear in mind that your marketing leadership team will likely only have the bandwidth to digest a handful of metrics. So you’ll want to stick with just two or three program-related KPIs. While the most important metrics will vary from one business to the next, you should consider including the following:

• # of corporate social media followers: Although follower count is typically seen as a vanity metric, leaders often equate it to the number of new customers they can reach and consider it a growth signal.
• External impressions: This KPI can help to demonstrate the impact of higher-profile programs such as influencer marketing and employee advocacy.

Bearing all of the above in mind, here’s how your digital index might look:

Final Thoughts

The world of social media measurement is constantly evolving – so what works for your team today might not make sense tomorrow.

With that in mind, be sure to regularly review your metrics, KPIs, and measurement techniques to ensure the data you gather is as valuable as possible to your team and stakeholders throughout your organization.

And for more insights on this topic, check out the following resources:

👉 13 Ways to Boost Your Social Media ROI

👉 Top 10 Social Media Analytics Tools

👉 13 Metrics to Track for Social Media Success

Want to discover more social media best practices and strategies from pro marketers? Sign up for one of our upcoming social media conferences.

Featured image by Freepik.