Bottom Line Social Media Metrics for the C-Suite

Two cups of coffee, a few clicks of the mouse and BAM! – analytics that’ll blow your boss’ socks off, complete with context, emphasis and emotion displayed so you don’t have to add, “you had to be there” to the end of your marketing report. Ah, yes. If only it was that easy.

Finding a way to consolidate the ups and downs, benefits and losses of a social media campaign or long-term branding strategy is a critical part of the program. Proving ROI, direct leads and revenue takes work, which is why it’s important to identify metrics that can lead to sales.

The following analytics will paint a picture for your C-suite, allowing for more insightful data so you can express how this translates to potential sales, and better brand positioning and awareness for the company:

Quality & Reach

Your followers, fans, group members and subscribers consist of your potential leads, so you should assess the quality of those lists. Assigning a value to those followers and qualifying those leads is your best bet in reporting them as engaged audiences (engaged here defined as open to receiving direct messages and becoming nurtured leads). Start by valuing followers based on their engagement with your content – a quality score if they themselves have are an influencer or are verified; a reach score if they frequently share your content to their network.

Engagement & Qualified Leads

Did you sustain your visitors’ interest? Where they engaged and responsive? If so, they qualify as first level leads. Did those visitors travel to specific tabs on your Facebook page? Share a comment or two? Download a guide, brochure or visit the “contact information” section? Gathering engagement metrics are fabulous but aligning those particular moves with certain product or services create opportunities for sales. Assign an engagement score for each call-to-action item to better qualify leads. Note: actions can have different scores, so if you deem a comment more valuable than visiting a certain page, up the rating you give to that action.

Traffic & Conversion Rates

Adding campaign tags and URLs to your targeted content, special tabs (the equivalent of custom pages on Facebook), videos or hashtags will help you identify specific website traffic and sales conversion rates. These should be aligned with the overall campaign’s goals and business objectives. Which products are you marketing on your social media outlets? What links are you adding to your blog posts or mentioning on Facebook? The more specific your campaign, the easier it is to identify referral sources on your website’s analytics report. Ensure there’s an accurate tracking system in place for this measurement to identify what percentage of your social media traffic has generated a lead for your sales team (you can even assign conversion scores to traffic if needed). The sales office may get a call from a website visitor, but do they know if the visitor has been to your Facebook page prior to the website? If you’ve added campaign tracking into the metrics, they will.

Costs & Profit

Activities and time attributed to revenue creation must be allocated to determine ROI. Considered a cheap (or free) tool, social media channels may be free, but the strategic writing, scheduling, monitoring and policy creation needed to make them valuable come at a cost. When pulling these metrics, make sure one-time and consecutive costs are separated and summarized – not doing so can skew all of the ROI reports you’ve so carefully put together.

Throughout your campaigns, benchmark everything. Using these analytics to track lead generation is key to providing your executive team with solid metrics. The worst mistake you can make is to just collect data and not conclude your findings. These insights and connections are yours to work with throughout entire buying cycle.