An increasingly frustrating problem we as marketers are facing on a daily basis is making sense of the large quantity of data from a wide variety of marketing activities, and social media is no exception.
Big data really is getting BIG, and being a digital agency that manages social media for multiple clients can really be an epic, time-consuming task. Follower growth and social media engagement over time are two of the most obvious ways to measure continued success (or failure) as the results are often black and white, but there are other metrics that can be used to improve your campaigns moving forward.
All that social data is there but how do you start making sense of it, and how do you action your findings to improve the weaker areas of your client's strategies?
All your client's social media engagement in one place
“What is our best performing social channel?
How many extra likes did we get across all our accounts last month?
Who are our top followers?”
These are just a few of the questions your clients will ask you to report on at any point. Whether your agency is being paid to grow followers or generate leads through social, you need to be armed with powerful social media analytics to satisfy your clients’ requirement for regular updates.
All key social media networks have an abundance of trackable data, but none can offer a unified view across all channels which is much needed to give an overview and plan ahead. Then, you need to summarize and action these results to make real strategic decisions that increase your ROI and value to the client.
The ability to identify the best day and time to publish a social media post as well as the type of content that creates the most (and least) engagement plays an important part in fine-tuning your clients' social media strategies. It should help you answer questions like “Should we invest in creating more video content?” and “Which is our fastest growing channel?”.
You may think these metrics are time-consuming to source, but we've worked hard to transform this mammoth task into something feasible on a daily basis.
The new reporting features are beautiful, polished and totally customizable, I appreciate the options for displaying client metrics - G2 Crowd User
What can you measure in the new Engagement Report?
- Audience growth (by day): See how your client's following has grown over time on all accounts simultaneously.
- Audience split: Discover which channels have the largest following and which are the top five gainers and losers. Networks supported: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, Google+.
- Content habits: This area tells you how many posts are published on average per day and how many engagements they get. Our clever probability formula displays which are the most likely times for maximum engagement so you can publish your meticulously crafted posts at the best times.
- Most engaged users: Look to this section to identify brand advocates and influencers who engage with your client's content. Reach out to them, offer perks or a simple thank you to build a stronger relationship.
- Top posts: These are the most engaging posts according to interactions (such as likes) and clicks. Use this data to create similar posts to boost your client's engagement on social.
- Top photos: Similar to posts, but focusing solely on photos to help you determine which type of images work the best on different networks. Always optimize your social media image sizes and experiment with text, different filters and image types (flat lay, white space, user-generated).
Power user tip: You can export all this data into CSV or download each graph as a PNG, JPEG, SVG or PDF and even add annotations. It's ideal for quick updates via email or your favorite communication tool.
For more tips, check out our guide - Getting started with Engagement Report.
Love the new Sendible Reports Hub! Great stuff. - Katie Griffith, Web Strategy Plus
Connecting the dots - from insights to actions
By looking at the data in the Engagement Report, you should quickly begin to see patterns and pinpoint new opportunities to explore. You may find that image posts are more popular on Twitter compared to Facebook, or the videos you post get the most engagement during the weekends. At this point, you may want to send more posts on the weekend to see if there's a further increase in engagement rate.
Similarly, if you notice a big spike in engagement after posting a five-minute video, it may be a signal that the audiences a) liked the video and b) you should post more of them. Cisco predicts 78% of mobile traffic will be video by 2021, so it's worth to start honing your skills now. From here, you can also experiment with video length and opt for uploading shorter videos to see if the engagement rate goes up even more.
It's possible that your client's social engagement may be going downwards instead. The cause could be a reduced number of posts published, but if the amount and type are roughly the same, your content is most likely less interesting to the audience. It may be worth investing time in community building and engaging with users on social media networks and sharing more content from non-competing brands. Reaching out to influencers or even sharing positive reviews can boost engagement as well.
I love that the Sendible team is responsive and really listens to what we need. The changes to reporting are AWESOME and I love being able to quickly move through accounts. - Bailey Barry, Serendipit Consulting
The eight ways our new reports help enhance social media strategies
Acquiring the data is only one part of the job. To improve your client's social media strategy and ROI, you need to take action on the findings in your social media reports.
You can utilize the social data in our reporting tools to:
- Get an all-round view of your client’s social media presence on a daily basis, giving you more time to plan and create outstanding work.
- Grow your clients’ following by knowing the demographics of their audience and changing the tone in your posts to better suit them.
- Distinguish which content types to use by identifying which are the most successful on each of the social media networks (e.g. images, images with text, long or short videos, or link shares at the most optimal times).
- Invest time in testing to strengthen your campaigns so you can build on what's already working, and discover new tactics that increase engagement rates and attract followers.
- Find and engage with top followers and influencers because they can not only skyrocket social referral traffic but also become your client's most loyal brand advocates.
- Discover new sales opportunities and potential leads by contacting users who engage with your client's brand on social media.
- Keep track of your client's reputation, and competing brands, by monitoring their profiles and conversations mentioning their brand. This gives your client an edge over their competitors - this type of active social listening is world class.
- Improve your agency’s productivity and workflow by significantly reducing the amount of time spent aggregating social media reports and presenting insights to clients
Learn how to transform social data into meaningful, actionable insights by watching our video below.
Power user tip: It’s good practice to look at different date ranges. For example, Instagram could have seen the largest increase in followers in the last month, but Twitter could have had the highest percentage increase over the last two weeks.
Step-by-step guide to building an all-round engagement report in Sendible
Let’s say your client has requested a combined report of their total social media engagement, activity and following across all their social accounts you manage for the past month.
Avoid the pain of taking a lot of time out of your busy day to run reports for each social network natively with the Sendible Engagement Report. You would simply need to:
- Log into Sendible
- Navigate to the ‘Measure’ tab and click on the Reports Hub.
- Select a social media report to run - in this case, “Engagement”.
- Set your date range for past month.*
- Run the report.
- Analyze the findings and propose suggestions or amends (if applicable).
- Export the data you want to share with the client as an image or in CSV.
- Take a well-deserved break at the ping pong table.
You can further enhance the report by adding annotations or creating a completely custom one by using some of the modules and adding more data for each individual social media network.
*Sendible stores all of your social data for 90 days and it can be easily exported in CSV or HTML.
It's time you show off all your hard work
It's vital to be able to demonstrate ROI during the early stages of a new client relationship and show the impact your agency has had on their business. You want to deliver for your new client, ensuring they agree to that 12-month retainer. Prove the impact that you’re having to them by not only analyzing and presenting your smart insights, but also taking actions that will further improve their social media engagement and following.
You can now use the Engagement Report to correlate data right back from the day you first connected your client’s social accounts to Sendible.
Power user tip: Don’t keep your clients waiting. Once you’ve run the Engagement Report, you can easily share insights with your clients with the click of a button by either emailing or printing if you’re presenting in person.
