The Social Media Metrics Map [Download Template]

A few years ago, we published the first edition of the Social Metrics Map, a guide to identifying the correct social media KPIs for each stage of the funnel.

Download The Full-Size Map

It’s an extremely detailed and thorough overview—and it’s one of the most valuable pieces of content we’ve ever published. Customers constantly tell us they have it hanging above their desk as a reminder and to help inspire new ideas.

But if you’re reading this, you already know that social media has changed a lot in the last few years. Platforms have grown more complex, new metrics have emerged for types of content that didn’t exist before and social marketers themselves are responsible for more comprehensive strategies than ever. So, it was time to refresh the map to reflect the increasingly sophisticated and complex field of social media.

In this guide, we’ll walk through a simple, three-step process for mapping owned, earned and paid social media strategy to their relevant KPIs and business value, depending on which stages of the funnel your social program focuses on.

Whether you are an in-house social marketer or an agency social pro consulting with your clients, the resources we’re sharing here will be valuable tools to make sure your social reporting strategy aligns to the right business goals.

• This guide will walk you through the process of setting goals, defining your objectives and determining the right approach to measurement. Bookmark this page for when you need to adapt or refresh your strategy.
• The social metrics map will serve as a resource for identifying the right metrics to track for each stage of the funnel and objective.
• The social metrics map worksheet will give you a resource to download and fill out on your own or with your clients to solidify your reporting approach and surface valuable social data to colleagues on other teams.

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How do you define what social media success looks like at your company? Setting clear goals for your organic and paid efforts will help you measure the effectiveness of your current strategy or work backward to develop a new social media strategy based on the impact you’re looking to make.

The outcome of this process is that you’ll find your definition of success easy to understand, easy to justify and most importantly, a relevant measure of your program’s effectiveness. Having clear, simple goals will set a framework for having discussions with your manager, marketing leaders and colleagues when it comes to the social campaign ideas, recommendations and the data you’ll plan to share with them. The marketing funnel is a powerful tool for aligning your goals to different stages of the buyer’s journey.

In this case, your overall social goals should reflect the goals your company has already set for marketing. For example, if one of your company’s goals is to increase brand awareness (overall or within a specific market), that goal is the same for social: increase brand awareness.

You can use the same approach when creating goals for specific campaigns or initiatives. For example, when your company is launching a new product, your goal might be more narrowly focused: educate our current customers about the benefits of (new product).

Paid and organic social media go hand-in-hand

When determining which goals (and metrics) matter most, consider how your paid and organic social efforts will work together. Whether these are led by different teams or you’re charged with both, you might find they are best suited to support different goals and stages of the marketing funnel.

For example, at Sprout, our paid social efforts are primarily focused on lead generation and customer acquisition—that is, the consideration and decision stages of the funnel. On the flip side, our organic social team focuses on building awareness, educating and engaging our social community and fostering brand advocacy—essentially all of the funnel stages where paid is less of a focus.

This shared approach ensures that as a social marketing team, we’re supporting all of our company’s marketing goals with tactics that have shown the greatest success, and we’re constantly communicating and sharing data to improve efforts on both sides.

Once you understand the different roles that paid and organic social can play, the next step is to go from your big-picture goals into specific objectives that you will implement to help you get there.

The marketing funnel is a linear representation of the buyer’s journey, designed to align marketing and sales activities. This depiction helps us visualize how different tactics will support our goals and objectives for each stage of the funnel.

These are the stages that a buyer goes through when trying to make a decision about a product or a service, and then after they make their first purchase and become a customer.

Companies create functions, programs and campaigns that allow their marketing team to move the buyer between those stages. So we align each stage with an objective (listed on the right).

The objectives are similar to your goals, but they are focused on action and provide guidance for the social media strategy you’ll create to achieve your goals. For example, the primary action in the awareness stage is to “reach new consumers.”

Which marketing objectives do you support?

Social teams are often expected to do it all—from increasing awareness and community engagement to driving sales and providing customer service.

But if you try to target people at every stage of the marketing funnel with the same tactics, you won’t be as effective. That’s why strategically setting goals and honing in on the specific funnel stages and objectives where social can make a measurable difference is so critical.

Do you have the right tactics?

Identifying the top marketing objectives that social supports will allow you to come up with the right tactics for execution.

For example, if your top goal is to increase awareness and you’re focused on the objective of reaching new customers, your social strategy might include tactics like:

• Partner with three new creators to create 3-5 pieces of content each per quarter
• Showcase team members’ expertise on your social profiles with 5-10 meet the team posts per quarter
• Increase Instagram Stories content by 20% with a ratio of 2:1:1 video to photography to interactive content

These tactics include specific points of reference in terms of either content volume or execution. These are helpful because they define what you can control: initiating influencer partnerships, creating social content and determining what is actually published.

Once you’ve determined your goals, objectives and social tactics, the next step is to identify the right metrics to set as your key performance indicators (KPIs). These metrics are what you’ll use to measure how your audience responds to this approach and how that contributes to your performance.

A recent Sprout survey of 300 marketers revealed 86% of marketing leaders and 89% of executives anticipate their use of social data will increase in 2023.

Why? Social data has the power to transform every level of your business. You just need to know how to use it.

For example, Sprout Social’s social analytics and reporting solutions offer access to a plethora of metrics that can help you monitor brand health, report on company-wide initiatives, gain a deeper understanding of your audience, iterate on product design and analyze your competitors. Social analytics unlock so much more than just follower size and likes. Request a demo today to see for yourself.

So, let’s make sense of all the data available on social. We identified three main categories metrics fall into that can help you determine what to track at each stage, and in each category.

Activity metrics are similar to what we talked about earlier—owned factors your team largely controls: volume of content, cadence/frequency of publishing, how often you’re boosting content or running ad campaigns. These also include earned metrics you can track like organic mentions of your brand or product.

Success metrics measure the results of that activity and tell you how the content and promotions are performing. This includes external metrics like impressions, engagements and more, depending on the stage of the funnel you’re focused on.

Impact metrics show you the impact of social in a larger context. This includes metrics like share of voice (SOV), traffic from social, sentiment and conversions both on your ads and on your website from social visitors.

Understanding the different types of metrics will help you explain your strategy to others and define the most important results to look at in your reporting.

Sharing social data throughout your organization

More departments are discovering the value of social data. According to the latest Index report, social media insights influence everything from customer service and corporate communications to product development and R&D.

To translate findings from social media into powerful data stories, you need more than just raw data. You need automated reporting tools, compelling analysis and digestible dashboards.

In the latest Social Metrics Map, we broke down funnel stages, objectives, strategy and content ideas, KPIs and who you should be sharing your data with. This map will serve as a reference point for you in building a strategy that proves the value of social media and educates your team on how owned, earned and paid social supports the buyer’s journey.

Download The Full-Size Map

Don’t worry, we aren’t recommending that every single one of those KPIs be your KPI. But as you review with your social objectives and strategy in mind, determine a few metrics that should be your key performance indicators and which additional metrics are important for you to track and understand to make strategic decisions. Those secondary metrics don’t need to be shared as part of your regular social media reports, but the insights you get from them can add color to your recommendations and changes you propose to your existing strategy.

Once you have your primary metrics identified, look at each of your goals and attach a value—a specific target number or percentage increase for what you want to achieve, based on your KPIs.

Reference points for setting your social goals

1. Your own benchmarks: Use your own baseline to set realistic goals for what you can achieve. Take a hard look at data from previous months, quarters and years to uncover opportunities to improve your performance and demonstrate your growth over time.
2. Peers: What kind of success have other companies in your industry seen? Which tactics did they use? Observe what you can learn about your shared audience, and notice if there are any gaps in their strategy.
3. Competitors: What type of results have your direct competitors seen? How much share of voice do they own? When analyzing their performance, dig into how you can find ways to outperform your competition on social (and overall).
4. Industry benchmarks: These are a good general point of reference, but industry benchmarks are generic and may include brands that are very different from yours (in terms of factors like company size, social audience size, goals, social resources and strategy). Use them as inspiration rather than for direct comparison.
5. Common sense, or good old “guesstimation”: If you have a good idea of what your goal should be but don’t have data to back it up, making an educated guess is better than nothing. You can adjust as you measure and benchmark your performance.

Setting goals like this and sharing them with the teams you collaborate with most frequently will help you generate new ideas, increase accountability and adjust your strategy throughout the year.

If you don’t define what success means for your social team, who will?

This process of mapping metrics to the buyer’s journey is the key to taking control of social media goals. We’ve turned the Social Metrics Map into a worksheet that you can use to fill out your team’s KPIs and determine your next steps for sharing social data with other stakeholders.

Download The Worksheet

Start by using the funnel to identify your objective, take all the metrics you have access to and narrow them down to the key metrics across paid, earned and owned activities. Then, plan your strategy accordingly.

Dive deeper and define your story with Sprout Social’s analytics

With Sprout, you can identify the right metrics to make crucial decisions about your social strategy and larger business operations. Access additional insights, select the metrics you want to track, build custom reports and more with the power of Premium Analytics.

Request a demo today to learn more.