CEOs: If you’re not asking for a social media scorecard, you need to be

As a CEO you rely on metrics like stock price, profit margins and revenue growth to monitor the health of your business. But if you aren’t factoring in meaningful social media data, you will miss crucial insights.

There is a massive amount of social media data available today, and businesses are eager to tap into it. Almost nine in 10 business leaders expect to use social data more to inform their decision making in the next three years, and 95% agree they must rely more heavily on social data to inform business decisions outside marketing.

Yet, raw data points or lengthy, stat-stuffed reports alone don’t tell a compelling story, which leads to data being underutilized. Executives need contextualized social media metrics like sentiment analysis, customer satisfaction and competitor benchmarks to make informed decisions.

With this impactful data on-hand, businesses can improve brand reputation, predict trends, differentiate from competitors and carve out a market niche. For these aspirations to come true, it starts with CEOs proactively asking for a social media scorecard to review on a regular basis.

Why a social media scorecard is crucial for leadership

Most CEOs are already a part of their brand’s external social strategy. Building an effective executive communications strategy is a solid step toward boosting brand awareness and PR efforts. Yet, to maximize the value of social, CEO engagement must go beyond being a spokesperson. If executives want to make the most of social media investments, they need to reevaluate how social data is internally shared and acted on across their teams.

By regularly drawing on social media intelligence, those in the C-suite are empowered to:

Gauge brand perception

Insights from social go far beyond likes, comments and engagements. Social is a 24/7 focus group where you can find unfiltered feedback about how your brand and products are perceived. Social listening enables you to analyze these customer conversations at scale, uncovering emerging trends in time to change or capitalize on them.

For example, you can get ahead of negative sentiment before it snowballs into something more serious like decreasing stock value or plummeting sales. You can also surface positive sentiment and consumer-generated trends and amplify them, like how McDonald’s translated the viral Grimace Shake trend into a nearly 12% increase in global same-store quarterly earnings.

Identify opportunities for growth

Voice of the customer insights from social equip companies with the feedback needed to grow in the right direction—from developing new products to charting expansions to building brand partnerships. With social insights, you can discover consumer pain points, where your target audience is located, how they use social and other brands they love. These learnings help your team create more effective campaigns, focus product development efforts and drive sales.

Take Airbnb. The homestay experience brand forged a partnership with Barbie™ the Movie via their Barbie DreamHouse, which generated mega buzz on social media and helped bolster their profitable brand awareness strategy.

Improve customer experience

According to The 2022 Sprout Social Index™, 36% of consumers will share a negative experience with a brand on social media with friends and family. A comparable 31% won’t complete their purchase, while 30% will buy from a competitor instead. By regularly reviewing customer care metrics like response time and customer satisfaction, CEOs can make sure teams have adequate resources, training and headcount to exceed customer expectations, especially during the busiest seasons.

This is what happened at Hudl. By switching from Social Studio to Sprout Social, 97% of Hudl’s customer interactions handled through Sprout reached a resolution within one business day—a major uptick in their responsiveness and an improvement to their customer experience.

Track competitor performance

Today, new competition emerges faster than ever, brands are up against legacy companies and D2C players alike, and you must compete for attention with companies far beyond your industry. So how can you make sense of it all?

Weaving together your brand’s performance metrics with competitor data and industry benchmarks creates a more complete picture of social’s impact, and adds much needed context that will make social data meaningful across your org. Knowing the details of your competitors’ performance helps gauge the value of your own, set smarter goals and refine your PR, sales and product development strategies.

With a tool like Sprout Social, you can visualize how your share of voice, engagement, sentiment and impressions data stack up to your competition, helping your brand stay on the pulse of what messages and strategies are resonating in your industry.

What to include in your social media scorecard

When asking for a social media scorecard, it’s most important to include metrics that are important to your business and industry. If you need help getting started, ask your team to include these social metrics in your dashboard:

• Brand health/audience sentiment: Consumer perception of your products, services or brands. Typically, this data is reported as positive, negative or neutral.
• Earned media value: The financial amount that you would need to spend in order to achieve the same level of promotion that your organic efforts are achieving. In other words, how much your company is saving by posting organic social content.
• Key social listening findings: While this will vary based on your company’s goals, this data should indicate the volume and sentiment of keywords surrounding your brand and products. For example, these metrics could speak to the success of your latest campaign, a new launch or relevant industry news.
• Competitor insights and analytics: A comprehensive view of your competitors’ performance across channels and data points. This should include not only quantity metrics (i.e., followers and views), but also quality metrics (i.e., engagement rate and sentiment).
• Customer service efficiency: Metrics related to your team’s customer care performance, including reply time, received messages, response volume, efficiency and your customer satisfaction score.

Start keeping score of your brand’s social media performance

The vast amount of social data available today presents an opportunity for business leaders to make informed decisions and deliver on key company priorities. But tactical social data alone isn’t enough to move the needle.

To surface data-driven insights from social, you should be asking your team to regularly share a social media scorecard with you. This is imperative for CEOs who hope to stay ahead of the competition.

Share this social media scorecard template with your team to guide their data collection and stay informed on a more consistent basis.