Working on organic social media can be tough. Everybody wants everything on every channel to help them ‘get the word out’ about their pet project. To them, success often looks like ticking off a checklist of channels with little focus on the actual outcomes.
I have been a social lead at several charities over many years, and in every case upon joining, my immediate priority has been to shift the social media team from a fulfilment function to a strategic one. Everyone who has ever worked with me will have heard me utter this statement countless times.
To make that shift effectively, you have to look beyond trust in your expertise and depend on incontrovertible, data-led evidence. Social media is a haven for data nerds because every click, impression and second of video watched is recorded by the platforms, ready for you to translate into a compelling narrative that informs better decisions.
In this blog, I’ll share how you can get a clearer view of your organic social media performance and the ways you’ll be more strategic in the process.
The challenges with third-party social media reporting
Many of us rely on third-party software to provide our reporting, which is certainly easy, but it can be fraught with problems. The biggest being that the numbers often don’t tally with what the platforms themselves are reporting, even though they are using a direct API connection.
Another biggie is that most software spits out engagement rates with no detailed explanation of how they’re calculated. Engagement rate is the unifying metric that allows you to compare post performance across different social media platforms, so you want to be sure that you understand which engagements have been used to calculate that number. At Cancer Research UK, for example, we exclude any engagement we would consider passive, such as a three-second video view.
If you change software at any point, it is highly unlikely the reporting functionality will be like for like so any year-on-year comparisons will be inaccurate and you may find key data points missing altogether.
If you want to make data-led decisions, you need consistent historical data and have full confidence in the data you are using.
What’s the alternative? Why manual reporting is worth the effort
You’re probably not going to like this, but the alternative is to pull the data manually every month. Sorry.
But there is good news. We have built a template for monthly reporting that does a lot of the hard work for you. Just input the data using the instructions provided and the spreadsheet will calculate your engagement rate by channel, generate performance graphs that you can pull into your reports and give you a full footprint (all channels combined) view of your social channels.
Why a full footprint view gives you a clearer picture on performance
With more and more channels and placements being used on social, your reporting can become overly complex for senior stakeholders or director-level dashboards. By having a full footprint view of your social performance, you can concisely provide a snapshot over any given time period and easily quantify the health of your social media. Typically, you would share total impressions, total engagements and the resulting engagement rate.
Why isn’t follower count a good measure of success?
Follower count is perhaps one of the worst metrics to measure success against. Don’t get me wrong, we absolutely record it and it is included within the template, but we place little to no emphasis on it when reporting our results internally.
There are two reasons for this. The first is that total follower count growth doesn’t take into account the actual number of new followers you have acquired over any given period of time. With various hygiene exercises being carried out by platforms to remove bot accounts and a natural reduction of followers taking your follower count down, it is likely that your new followers outnumber any increase in total follower count. New followers are the lifeblood of your social audience, something has made them decide to follow you, they could be crying out to know how they can fundraise for you or they could be your next beneficiary. Our reporting template will help you separate these two numbers so you can report on new followers and total follower count.
The second reason is that the reach of your posts is no longer a function of your follower count. In the good old days, your feed would be a chronological stream of posts from the people and pages you follow. But now, all the main social media channels fill your feed with posts their algorithm thinks you will like, alongside those of the accounts you follow, to encourage you to scroll indefinitely. This is the reach you are chasing. If a post is overperforming with your existing audience, then the algorithm will assume that it will appeal to users who share key commonalities with your audience and start pushing it into their feeds. That’s earned reach money can’t buy!
Your total follower count could be relatively static, but your impressions could be shooting up year on year. This is what you should be looking for in your reporting and shouting about.
How better reporting helps you push back on requests
Once populated, the template generates all sorts of key data to inform strategy, such as average impressions per post per channel. So, if niche requests come in based on your follower count and the assumption is that you will find the needle in the haystack, you can go back with the actual number of people the post might reach, explain that the haystack is likely too small to contain any needles, decline to post and suggest a more viable solution. Work smarter, not harder.
Let’s all speak the same language with a shared approach to reporting
The more charities that adopt this methodology, the better our knowledge sharing can be. Engagement rate should be the universal language of social media, but if we all calculate it differently or take it from our various social media tools, we no longer know what good looks like beyond comparing it to our own previous reporting.
We’ve worked with Charity Digital Benchmark to develop and ratify this methodology and we’re confident that it is simple and robust, even if it does take a little longer than running a report via your existing tools. And if you haven’t invested in software capable of running your reporting, even better, now you can do it yourself for free!
How to get started with the template
Download the free template and accompanying guidance to start recording your monthly social media data using a consistent reporting framework.
Athar explored what good social media reporting looks like and how to apply this reporting framework during his session, ‘Measuring what matters: a smarter approach to reporting on social media’, at the Next-Level Digital Engagement Conference. You can watch the session and more with tickets on demand.
Image credit: Photo by RDNE Stock project on Pexels.
