Social media reporting is a great way to gain insight into your current strategy. As many of the social media platforms expand their analytics capabilities, it can be a bit hard to decipher what metrics to review and what you can gain from them. Check out our list below that can help you get started on creating informative reports for your trade association.
1. Understand What You’re Looking For
Keep your trade associations goals in mind when putting together your report. Are you hoping to gain account followers or increase engagement on your page? Do you have a paid element of your social media plan that you need to consider? It’s important to take inventory of what you want to learn from your social media reports before you create them. This ensures you will be getting the information you need to inform your strategy moving forward.
After you have an idea of what you want to learn, make sure you understand the meaning behind each metric. Below we will dive into each metric and why it’s important.
2. What to look for
Engagement
The total number of interactions (reactions, comments, and shares) received by your Pages’ posts as well as mention of your Page (that is, reactions to user check-ins, event responses, mentions, likes of your Pages, Saves and more)
Looking at engagement rates is a great place to start when analyzing your social media performance because it lets you know how the people seeing your posts are reacting to it. Whether it’s likes or other reactions, comments, or shares, each provides key insights into your audience behavior. If you are running paid campaigns it’s important to evaluate your paid and organic impressions separately to get a sense of how well your paid promotions are performing.
Page/Post Impressions
The total number of times any organic or paid content from your Page or about your Page appeared on someone’s screen. Content can include posts, check-ins, ads, stories from friends who interacted with your Page, and more. The number of times your Page’s posts appeared on someone’s screen. Posts include statuses, photos, links, videos, Stories and more.
Not only do you want to have an understanding of the engagement that is taking place on your social media accounts, but it’s important to know what the impressions were as well so you can compare the two. Analyzing both page and post impressions each month will give you a sense of the page and post growth. Are impressions increasing each month? Was one month more successful than another? Asking these questions can help you draw the right conclusions about both paid and organic social media efforts.
Audience Analysis
This is a huge metric for trade association marketing. Find out if your posts are resonating mainly with association members or if the public is taking notice as well. LinkedIn for example can give you a great breakdown of your audience by industry. This is especially helpful for creating content that speaks to the right people. Other audience factors to consider are age and location. Each will help inform your content strategy moving forward.
Anecdotal Takeaways
Quantitative metrics are not the only thing to consider when reviewing the performance of your social media activity. Do you see better performance on posts that include images or links? Do you see more favorable comments when you have questions in the copy? These are just some examples of takeaways you can gain from reviewing not just the numbers but the posts themselves. Take the top three and bottom three posts from the month and look at them to see if you can find any differences or similarities between the two groups. If you can isolate things like word choice, image choice, link use, etc., you’ll know what changes to make in content moving forward.
3. Metrics to Check but Don’t Obsess Over
Followers
It’s easy to get hung up on the number of followers you gain and lose but unless they are rising and falling by the hundreds everyday this metric will typically not require much follow up. This could change depending on if you are running an ad with the goal of gaining new followers but keep in mind that you will always see some level of fluctuation in your follower count. A monthly check in will be enough to keep you informed without over-analyzing.
Social media reports at the monthly, quarterly and annual level are important parts to the whole of your social media strategy. After all, if you don’t know how your posts are doing, how will you know what to keep doing or to improve upon?
Learn more about trade association marketing from The Cyphers Agency here.
