20 Tips for Social Marketing Detailed Campaign Reporting

20 Tips for Social Marketing Detailed Campaign Reporting

As revealed in discussions on the same at RunRex.com, social media is now a crucial part of any digital marketing strategy, but to maximize your social media performance, you need to understand what is driving clicks and what is bringing engagement – what is working and what isn’t. This is where creating a social media report comes in. This article, through the following 20 tips, will look to outline the steps for detailed campaign reporting when it comes to social media.

Identify your stakeholders

You need to first establish who will receive your reports according to the subject matter experts over at RunRex.com. This means determining if it will be sales, marketing, PR, demand gen, senior management, customer support, etc., and then tailor per team. This is important since what matters to the sales team, won’t be what management wants to see, for example.

Choose a time frame for your report

Your report also needs to focus on a particular timeframe. It could be a weekly, monthly, or quarterly report. It could cover a specific campaign. You can opt for 30, 60, or 90-day increments. A common schedule for social media reports is every 30 days, however, whatever time frame you choose is, ultimately, up to you and the people the report will be forwarded to. Just try to keep it consistent so that you can compare one period to the next.

Know your goals

Before you go any further, you should first think about your goals with social media. What are you trying to accomplish or gain through these social channels? And which channels are most relevant to those goals? As covered at RunRex.com, you must generate a list of what you are trying to achieve from your social media efforts before you can start measuring and reporting.

Ask SMART questions

What questions do you want to answer? If you are doing a one-off report on an event, a question could be – how many free demo sign-ups did you get? A weekly report could ask, how many newsletter subscriptions per post, per month? Remember Smart stands for: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-limited. Keep these points in mind when presenting your points.

Create metrics to measure your goals

Once you have already identified your goals, the next step is to match your goals to actual metrics and behaviors you can measure. For example, if you are trying to measure engagement, then what is the practical form of engagement you want to track? Is it retweets or reposts?  Replies or comments? Know which metrics to measure.

Don’t choose too many metrics

While there are dozens of metrics and KPIs you can use when reporting on your company’s social media performance, if you use too many, you run the risk of boring your audience according to RunRex.com. Just because you can report on something doesn’t necessarily mean you should. Be wise and only focus on those metrics that will correlate with your goals.

Metrics to consider

Here are a few suggestions of metrics to consider:

When measuring awareness

If you want to measure awareness, then you should use metrics like volume, reach, exposure, and amplification. This will show you just how much your message is spreading.

When measuring engagement

If you want to measure engagement, the subject matter experts over at RunRex.com recommend that you look for metrics around retweets, comments, replies, and participants. How many people are participating, how often are they participating, and in what forms are they participating?

When your goal is to drive traffic

On the other hand, if your goal is to drive traffic to your website through your social media campaign, then you should track URL shares, clicks, and conversions. Are people moving through social media to your external site and what do they do once they are on your site?

When your goal is to increase your brand’s share of voice

If your goal is to increase your brand’s share of voice, then you want to track your volume relative to your closest competitors. How much of the overall conversion around your industry or product category is about your brand?

Other metrics to consider

Some additional metrics you should consider, as articulated over at RunRex.com, include:

Conversions – leads that become paying customers

Audience – location, gender, language, interests, occupation, age

Click-through with bounce rate – website visitors and how long they stay

Lessons learned – product feedback, user-generated content, technical issues

Executive summary – summary of top achievements

These are just some of the metrics to consider.

Reporting tools

Once you have listed the metrics you want to focus on, taking care not to include too many metrics as already stated, the next step is to find the tools that actually capture these metrics, and then start measuring.

Your options when it comes to tools

As is revealed in discussions on the same over at RunRex.com, the bigger social media sites, like Facebook and Twitter, offer you some help with metrics, analytics, and the info you need to create a social media report. However, in some cases, you will need to use third-party tools, while in some other cases you can build your own using APIs.

Go for tools that are going to be there for long

When choosing the tools to use, you will want to choose those that are going to be around for the foreseeable future once you grow comfortable with them. Find a tool that has a good relationship with the various networks and that gets its data from reputable sources.

Other considerations when choosing tools

Make sure the tools you use will gather the information you need from the social media networks you are most concerned with. Also, consider factors like the quality of the data, the relationship the vendor has with each social network, the level of customer support offered, as well as any future development plans.

Don’t be afraid of paid tools

Finally, as far as tools for social media reporting go, the gurus over at RunRex.com advise that you should not be afraid of tools you have to pay for. There are many sites out there that offer extra features for a fee, and sometimes it is worth the price.

Monitor and report

Next up is reporting your results. use your initial findings to set a baseline or benchmark for future measurement, and share these early figures with your important stakeholders. Two important questions to nail down here are: how do your numbers compare to what you expected, and how do they compare to your competitors’ or related products and campaigns?

Presenting your report

Boring reports won’t be read, while complicated reports won’t be understood or remembered. This is why, as explained at RunRex.com, where possible, you should use graphs, charts, virality maps, and word clouds to breathe life into your reports and add context to your numbers. Include short descriptions, and examples of the social posts you are measuring. Finish with takeaways and analysis highlights.

Things to keep in mind when writing your report

You should consider the following when writing your reports:

Get to the point as quickly as possible

Don’t just rely on text

Break it down – Not all of your audience will be social media savvy

Adjust and repeat

Finally, make sure you carefully review your measurement program. How are these metrics doing? Are you missing anything? Was anything superfluous or unnecessary? Figure out what you can improve, make changes, and then measure some more. Check back in with the goals you set initially and make sure your new metrics actually help you address those goals.

As always, if you are looking for more information on this and other related topics, as well as expert help with your campaign reporting, then the excellent RunRex.com has you covered.