The ultimate guide to social media reporting

Welcome to another edition of PROse, where we explore the science behind building a brand.

In today’s email, we discuss:

• The problem with “lights on” social strategies

• My Performance Matrix for measuring content

• How to measure social’s impact on your company’s bottom line

Yo! I’m Darien from Antidote 👋🏾. Every week I share what I learn about the science of building a brand. If someone forwarded this email to you or you’re reading this online, welcome to the fold! What you're about to read is an unconventional view on B2B marketing.

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“How many leads is social bringing in?”

Most social media pros hate this question because it usually comes right before a new directive for every piece of content to be tied to the company’s bottom line. And to be frank, it is misguided, but I understand why leadership teams end up going in that direction.

In this newsletter we’re going to explore some methods I think are better. But first, a mini-rant on the role and value of social media managers:

Companies that do the bare minimum to keep their social accounts active may suffer even more than companies that overemphasize leads. I call this the “lights on” strategy. It’s when companies prioritize any activity (e.g. copy-paste articles, posting site/blog links, etc.) over creating engaging content.

Most times it’s because the company lacks someone with the time and/or knowledge to build a more sophisticated social media presence. But here’s the truth: if social isn’t a meaningful part of your marketing strategy, you’re better off leaving it alone completely.

Posting bad content isn’t earning you any attention or goodwill with your target audience, it only takes up time that can be spent somewhere else.

Okay, let’s talk about measurement & reporting.

Don’t think in one dimension

Measuring content, and social media performance as a whole, on likes or views is shortsighted. Of course those metrics matter, but alone, they don’t tell you much.

You want to know how you’re doing across multiple dimensions - what type of content is performing, in comparison to what, and finally, how is that affecting your “bottom line”.

Understanding the multiple dimensions helps you identify larger patterns, spot early trends, and find opportunities of arbitrage (because let’s face it, that’s the game we’re really playing as marketers).

Performance Matrix

There are four quadrants we track for performance:

1. Angle

2. Genre

3. Format

4. Medium

Each has a set of variables that can be measured (the ones listed above isn’t all). This means you can not only see how a given set of variables perform, you can also compare them to another set of variables.

I use Sprout Social because they make it easy to tag and see this performance (not sponsored, although if someone from Sprout is reading this, say hi! 🙂), but you can also do this with a little bit of Excel/Sheets magic.

Now, I’ll caution: this level of granularity is probably more than what most smaller companies/startups need. I use it because I’m managing multiple clients who have varying degrees of interest in granular details - and because it makes spotting macro trends over multiple accounts easier.

How to know if organic social is impacting the bottom line?

Let’s circle back to an earlier point about tracking leads being a misguided metric for social. Leads matter, and social should have some role to play in “creating” them. But how you measure and the period length you measure also matters.

Organic social is not like paid media or outbound. You can’t just log-in and get distribution. It has to be built up over a long period of time, before you start making asks.

Think about it like an apple tree. If you plant an apple tree seed today, you don’t expect it to fully blossom tomorrow. And if you start plucking the apples at the first sight of existence, you will have few ripe, edible ones.

The same principle applies here: don’t expect leads immediately, and don’t try to capture leads immediately. Give it time.

The second point is about software. Software attribution (Google Analytics, et al) is primarily useful for understanding your customer’s journey.

It is not useful for understanding what programs are effective at driving demand for your product. It doesn't matter which methodology you subscribe to—multi-touch, first touch, last touch. Yet, it’s how most marketing teams evaluate which programs get budget and which get cuts.

If you want to understand what programs are driving demand, you need look no further than the customers themselves. Self-reported attribution, or asking your customers to literally tell you how they find you, is by far the best way to understand what’s working.

How do you do that? Add two fields to your demo request form: a dropdown with your current marketing programs (e.g. social, podcast, word of mouth, etc.) & a free-form text field for capturing details (which social platform, what person/community sent the referral, etc).

You can also use this data to understand what programs are driving the most qualified leads (close-won %), and pair it with software attribution to understand what parts of your funnel can be optimized based on how your audience navigates from point A to point B.

A common pushback on this approach is that your customer may not remember where they first found you. That’s a feature, not a bug. By definition, if a customer originally discovered your company in e.g. a billboard ad but doesn’t remember it, it wasn’t effective at influencing them.

That's a wrap, folks! But before you go...

Questions, disagree, feedback? Let’s hear it.

See you next week,