Social Media Data Analytics Resources | Sprout Social

Breaking Ground: The latest Sprout updates you need to know about

Tim Clarke — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 16:00:23 +0000

If you can believe it, Sprout recently celebrated its 14th anniversary. Thinking back on what social media looked like in 2010—Pinterest and Instagram had just launched, Vine and Google+ weren’t even around yet—it’s safe to say our industry has endured more than one evolution over the last few years.

Through that time, our north star has always been to help our customers not just manage but maximize the power of social. It’s the reason why we are constantly, thoughtfully investing in our platform—because our industry doesn’t move forward unless we’re equipping our users with the tools they need to do exceptional work.

Which is why I’m thrilled to share that Sprout has launched Breaking Ground: a new quarterly program to keep our customers up to date on everything you need to know about our latest product advancements, so that you can drive more business impact from social.

Here’s a glimpse at what we’re releasing this quarter.

Advancing AI to make space for human creativity and connections

Social media teams are at max capacity. Our recent Social Media Productivity Report found that almost half of social marketers feel they sometimes or rarely have enough time to get their work done, and even more (63%) agree that manual tasks prevent them from doing high impact work.

At Sprout, we embrace a human-centric philosophy to developing AI capabilities that empower the people behind your brand to work faster and smarter. Over the years, we have consistently invested in AI and machine learning at Sprout, but 2023 marked a significant leap forward with the introduction of numerous AI Assist capabilities.

Our latest AI and automation capabilities build on this momentum, helping you focus on what matters most: the creativity and strategic thinking no machine can emulate. Listening customers will be able to tap into Analyze by AI Assist and Summarize by AI Assist, new widgets that will help you distill content and surface important conversation trends faster. For customer care teams, updates including AI conversation summaries, Response Recommended and Message Intent will make it easier for agents to get an at-a-glance view of incoming messages, ensuring the most urgent ones get routed and responded to promptly.

AI has been vital in helping Thailand-based Minor Hotels expand its online presence to match its growing physical footprint. Before using Sprout, their social team had minimal insight into how their efforts were performing—whether their campaigns were resonating or bringing in new customers. In a fiercely competitive travel and tourism industry, they needed a way to grab analytics more frequently and uncover market trends.

Enter Sprout. With AI Assist and Listening, Minor Hotels increased the frequency of their reporting twofold and saved over 192 hours annually on pulling reports. Today, our AI capabilities allow the Minor Hotels team to proactively monitor performance, adapt their social content and inform business strategy.

On the content front, we’ve also introduced Generate by AI Assist. This innovation automatically produces alt-text for social post images, making it easier to build a more accessible social presence.

“Working to make my social content accessible to all has been a top priority of mine for years, so Sprout’s new AI-generated alt text feature has been a major win. The detail picked up in the description is impressive and much more accurate than I’ve experienced with other AI tools. This saves me time and mental focus on each post, which I can put back into the content,” said Jessie Brown, Social Media Specialist at the Iowa Department of Natural Resources.

Telling a richer story about how social impacts the business

Connecting your social strategy to business-wide sales and revenue goals remains one of marketers’ most elusive challenges—especially for those lacking the right tools. Almost twice as many social media marketers who use a dedicated social media management platform say their brand’s social efforts contribute significantly to revenue compared to those without, according to the Social Media Productivity Report.

Which is why we’re excited to roll out new capabilities like My Reports, a new Premium Analytics reporting interface that lets users dig even deeper into their data. Users can customize their reports using a breadth of data points—including post-level performance, customer care and even Employee Advocacy metrics—to tell a more detailed story about social’s impact on the business.

For iHeartRadio Canada, which manages a portfolio of over 300 social accounts, Sprout has been essential in not just scaling but proving the power of their content strategy. As Clayton Taylor, National Content Manager – Digital Radio, explained, “In terms of ROI, Sprout helps us gain recognition with our direct audience while also demonstrating value to our branded partners and sponsors. We can also show our music label partners why it makes sense for them and their artists to work with iHeartRadio Canada.”

Drawing a clear line from influencers to revenue

How do you typically measure the impact of your influencer marketing efforts—Post views? Impressions? Comments?

These are each reliable ways to quantify the power of influencers, but the truth is this: Influencer marketing has a greater impact on conversion and sales than we give it credit for. Almost half of all consumers (49%) make purchases at least once a month because of influencer posts, according to The 2024 Influencer Marketing Report.

With Tagger, Sprout Social’s influencer marketing platform, we’re making it easier to track how influencer partnerships add to your bottom line. Instagram Tap Tag mentions will allow influencers you partner with to organically integrate product tags directly into their posts. On the reporting side, users can track engagement, reach, and conversions—helping you develop long-term relationships with the influencers driving both awareness and sales for your business.

Consider the role influencers played in Lovesac’s 25th anniversary campaign, “Rewriting the Rules of Comfort.” With help from their agency KWT Global, they used Sprout Social Influencer Marketing to recruit long-time brand fans and new influencers (including celebrities like Olympic snowboarder Shaun White, Brandy and Travis Barker) to show how they rewrite their own rules of comfort at home with Lovesac styles.

As Erin Ally, Vice President of Social Media and Influencer Marketing at KWT Global explained, “We wanted to be able to find influencers proactively, report effectively and easily on influencer successes to stakeholders, and manage it all through one platform that is intuitive and anyone on our team could learn to use…After evaluating various solutions, choosing Sprout Social’s influencer marketing platform was a no-brainer for us.”

With our platform, Ally’s team can tell a stronger story about the success of campaigns like Lovesac’s—which was particularly impressive. The months-long effort generated $8.48M in earned media value, 57 million impressions and a 14.3% increase in Lovesac Q3 sales year over year.

Helping brands meet their audience in more places

Today’s social media ecosystem is made up of a growing list of networks, each with unique algorithms, content formats and audiences. Consumers are using a mix of them all to consume content and connect with their communities. In fact, 38% of consumers plan to use more networks this year compared to 2023, according to a Q4 2023 Sprout Pulse Survey.

One of the latest networks captivating consumers and brands alike? Threads.

Marketers across industries have experimented with the community-centric platform since it launched in July 2023—but now they can elevate their approach with Threads scheduling, engagement and reporting capabilities in Sprout. In less than a year, Boston-based public media producer GBH has started posting to Threads across 15 production units—growing an audience of nearly 180,000 followers.

“Now that Threads publishing and scheduling has been added to Sprout, GBH’s social media managers—who are responsible for growing and engaging audiences for their specific productions or units—can more easily and efficiently leverage the platform to build and deepen connections with our communities,” said Zack Waldman, GBH Social Media Strategist.

Ready to break barriers?

Our vision at Sprout is to be the social platform powering the world’s most innovative brands. But we only get there by building software that exceeds our customers’ needs both now and in the future. We can’t wait to see the ground-breaking work marketers and customer care professionals accomplish with some of these latest releases.

But again, these are just a few highlights of the product updates we have and will be unveiling this quarter. Learn more about these releases and our Breaking Ground Q2 2024 launch event.

The post Breaking Ground: The latest Sprout updates you need to know about appeared first on Sprout Social.

6 must-have social media dashboard templates for brands

Phoebe Lown — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 14:03:22 +0000

You’re in a meeting with senior executives and stakeholders and they ask you to quantify your team’s performance across social channels and accounts. You also need to explain how your performance influences company goals. Sounds familiar?

You know raw social analytics is complex, and sharing it with people who have limited hands-on-the-keyboard social experience is ineffective. So, instead of getting granular, you provide them with a digestible overview of your most important KPIs. You tell a compelling data story that helps them visualize how your customer care, awareness and engagement efforts matter to your company’s big picture. You captivate your audience and prove the power of social.

How did you do this? Using a social media dashboard to glean vital insights from your data will help you successfully convey your team’s impact every time.

To help you get to this ideal scenario, we’re highlighting examples of social media dashboards you can use to illustrate the value of social media across your business.

What is a social media dashboard?

A social media dashboard is a tool that aggregates your crucial social media metrics across networks to quickly measure the performance of your posts/campaigns, customer care interactions and community engagement. Social media dashboards empower you to dissect results, iterate strategy, demonstrate value and influence decision making.

The Importance of a strategic social media analytics dashboard

The right social media dashboard makes all the difference for brands that rely on their online presence. Dashboards provide a summary of social interactions, which help teams respond and engage with trends and customer needs proactively. Here are four benefits you’ll enjoy from a strategic social media analytics dashboard.

1. Easier decision-making with real-time data

A social media dashboard integrates real-time data across social platforms, which helps you to make informed decisions quickly. This immediacy helps you adapt your strategies in response to live customer feedback and market shifts.

2. Streamlined reporting and insights

Dashboards condense complex datasets into actionable insights and simplify reporting. They also make it easier to strategize around data and communicate findings to ensure stakeholders understand the impact of social media efforts.

3. Competitive edge through in-depth analytics

With features like competitive analysis and sentiment tracking, dashboards provide a deeper insight into your performance and that of your competitors. This helps you maintain a competitive edge and fine-tune social media marketing strategies.

4. Optimized ROI

Dashboards highlight the most successful campaigns and tactics, helping businesses allocate resources to optimize marketing spend and improve your ROI.

What insights should your social media dashboard software include?

Every data dashboard serves a different function—from tracking brand awareness to aggregating marketing metrics in one place. Your social media dashboards should be built with your unique use cases in mind. While each dashboard’s ingredients might differ, the core component is visualized metrics that help explain why your brand did or didn’t meet a goal.

To help determine the specifics you should include in your dashboard, ask yourself these six questions:

What is the goal of this dashboard? (Example: demonstrate positive changes in brand reputation)
Which metrics matter most to achieving this goal? (Example: sentiment)
Who is the audience and how much do they know about the topic? (Example: CMO and R&D)
Which channels need to be measured? (Example: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter)
What is the duration of time needed to effectively measure change? (Example: one month)
How do we compare to competitors? (Example: competitive analysis and hashtag monitoring)

Ultimately, you should have multiple social media dashboards for different stakeholders and purposes. For example, one for tracking monthly changes in brand reputation and sentiment, as seen in the example above. Another for sharing quarterly customer care productivity. By using a platform like Sprout Social, you can access and create custom social media dashboard templates that save you time and deliver presentation-ready dashboards for different business segments.

Social media dashboard templates to use across your organization

Here are six types of social media dashboard templates designed to breakdown sophisticated reporting and help refine your data-driven strategy.

Social media engagement dashboard

Social media engagement is a barometer of how much your audience interacts with your content. When examining engagement metrics across months or years, a dashboard with a birds’ eye view helps you identify performance trends in your content strategy. With these insights, you can continuously replicate your successes and iterate on your least popular content.

Goal: Determine if your content resonates with your audience
Metrics: Impressions, engagements, link clicks, ad spend and conversions
Audience: Social media team and other stakeholders who influence content direction
Channels: Cross-channel or channel-specific
Cadence: Weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly

Here are a few examples of Sprout Social’s social media engagement dashboards that give you the tools to proactively grow your audience and repeatedly test your content direction.

Profile Performance Report provides a high-level aggregation of analytics so you get a pulse on the performance of your social profiles. With this report, you can view Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube and TikTok metrics to better understand the impact of your social efforts.

The Post Performance Report helps you analyze your published content down to the individual post and understand its performance with your audience. It provides a unified view of your post performance across all social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest and TikTok.

Our Cross-Network Paid Performance Report consolidates paid campaign-level data from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. From the Overview tab, you’ll see a summary of your paid performance, impressions, engagements, web conversions, video views and a breakdown of key performance metrics by channel.

Brand awareness dashboard

Brand awareness requires continuous effort and frequent pulse checks. Use data stories to determine your reach, earned media value and share of voice.

Goal: Analyze rates of target audience recognition and awareness
Metrics: Impressions, reach, engagements, mentions, earned media value and sentiment
Audience: Teams across marketing, including social media
Channels: Cross-channel
Cadence: Weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly

Sprout’s Listening tools help you tap into global social conversations to extract actionable insights that improve brand health and fuel brand awareness. With Sprout’s Listening dashboards, you can track conversations concerning your brand to illuminate consumer attitudes, gain visibility into customer experience and sentiment, conduct competitive analysis and stay up to date with trends in your industry.

As many social media managers will tell you, achieving organic awareness and reach on social media is harder than ever. At Sprout, our team uses employee advocacy to breakthrough and track our success with brand awareness dashboards in our Employee Advocacy platform.

Here are two examples of employee advocacy dashboards we use on a monthly and quarterly basis:

Sprout’s Advocacy General Report provides an overview of our latest activity. The report analyzes the number of active stories, total shares and shares across each network, and how that translates into potential reach and earned media value. As you scroll, you’ll see sharing trends, the highest volume of sharing activity and overall story performance, top users by shares and top users by potential reach.

Sprout’s Advocacy Content Report dives deeper into data gleaned from your active content. You’ll see how many shareable or internal stories were active each day along with a comparison to the previous month. The Content Breakdown chart provides stats on shareable and internal content including days, views, shares, engagement and potential reach for each Story

Social competitive analysis dashboard

Tracking your competition on social media gives you essential insights to make strategic decisions. Keeping an eye on competitors helps you understand how well you do in comparison and helps you to set benchmarks. A social competitive analysis dashboard combines market share, competitor activity and audience engagement to help you gain a competitive edge.

Goal: Gauge competitive position and strategy effectiveness
Metrics: Market share, competitor post frequency, engagement rates and sentiment analysis
Audience: Strategic planners and marketing executives
Channels: Multiple platforms for comparative analysis
Cadence: Monthly and quarterly updates

With Sprout’s competitive analysis and social listening tool, you’ll see how well your competitors do on social media. You can compare how often they post, how many people interact with their posts and how many followers they gain.

Social customer care dashboard

Customer care is an essential function of social media. A social customer care dashboard measures, benchmarks and analyzes your team’s efforts, and reveals any critical opportunities to improve customer support. This dashboard is especially important for enterprise brands who typically have larger teams managing an influx of incoming requests across multiple accounts.

Goal: Provide visibility into customer care team performance
Metrics: Response rate, action rate, average time to action and total actioned messages
Audience: Customer care/support teams, sales, marketing and product development
Channels: Cross-channel inboxes (Pro tip: Sprout’s Smart Inbox unifies all incoming messages and mentions into a single stream)
Cadence: Monthly, quarterly and yearly

A customer care dashboard will help you illuminate how many messages your brand receives, your response rate and your average response time, like Sprout’s Inbox Activity Report demonstrates

Business intelligence dashboard

A Business Intelligence Dashboard helps to improve your social media marketing strategy by viewing consumer interactions across multiple channels. This dashboard aggregates data and offers in-depth analytics to help you understand how your social media campaigns are performing in relation to business-wide objectives and social media KPIs.

The dashboard combines different data sources, like social media stats and CRM info, to thoroughly examine customer behaviors and preferences. This helps you tweak your strategies to reach the right people with the right messages at the right times. It also helps you optimize your marketing spend by showing which campaigns and channels drive the highest ROI.

The business intelligence dashboard’s key features include tracking user engagement, conversion rates and customer journey patterns from initial contact through conversion. This level of detail provides you with the data to craft more personalized and effective marketing strategies.

Goal: Track the customer journey across digital touchpoints (including social)
Metrics: Customized to meet your goals. Examples include engagements per network/per state, ad impressions and email CTR
Audience: Executives and stakeholders
Channels: Cross-channel
Cadence: Quarterly and yearly

As Sprout’s Tableau BI Connector displays, you gain valuable insights by combining the power of social data with other business channels into one dashboard. This ensures social data and insights are included in your 360-degree view of your customers—proving the value social brings to your business.

Executive dashboard

Most executives aren’t immersed in the world of social media on a frequent basis. Metrics that are meaningful to you and your team miss the mark when communicating with the C-suite. As a result, you might struggle to secure buy-in and investment to take your social efforts to the next level.

For best results, create customized reports for leadership that bridge knowledge gaps at the executive level and translate the raw data into a narrative that resonates with anyone in leadership. Create an executive summary of your most compelling social media reports to convince even the most skeptical executives about the impact social has on your business.

Goal: Deliver clear evidence of the social team’s impact
Metrics: Customized to each executive. Examples include share of voice, potential reach, earned media value, customer care productivity and competitor analysis data
Audience: Leadership and teams across marketing, including social media
Channels: Cross-channel
Cadence: Weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly

Use Sprout’s My Reports feature to create custom reports to easily track your most valued social data. Choose which metrics are included to evaluate performance based on your specific business goals.

How to create a social media dashboard

To set up your social media dashboard, follow these steps to quickly review and report on your strategy, and highlight your team’s performance.

1. Determine purpose and audience

The first step toward creating a social media dashboard is figuring out its purpose. What goal is this dashboard trying to achieve? Who will it reach? How familiar are they with the topic? Clearly define your purpose and audience before doing anything else.

2. Decide which kind of dashboard to create

Decide which kind of dashboard best fits your needs. Revisit the six social media dashboard types mentioned above for inspiration. Choose a dashboard with relevant metrics that align with your goals and demonstrate social’s value to stakeholders. Be mindful of your audience and their social media experience level when deciding how detailed your dashboard should be.

3. Gather the metrics

Next, you’re ready to dig into the data. Scope out which networks need to be measured and the length of time required to demonstrate meaningful results. Collect raw data across those channels during that time period. You can start by using metrics from the native apps, like engagement rate, reach, followers and plays.To up your sophistication level and simplify your workflow, use a social media analytics tool like Sprout to automate the data collection process and easily generate dashboards that are ready to share.

4. Share with stakeholders

Transform raw figures into riveting dashboards and data visualizations. Use key data points, complementary graphs and your expert analysis to give stakeholders a visual depiction of your team’s progress.

After creating your first dashboard, repeat the first three steps for each dashboard you need. Keep momentum going by updating your dashboards on a weekly, monthly or quarterly basis and sharing them with stakeholders often.

Streamline your analytics with Sprout’s social media dashboard

Social media dashboards convert your cumbersome social data into influential stories that are easy to absorb. You’re able to articulate your social ROI to stakeholders across the org by breaking down complexity and clearly communicating your findings.

Start your free trial to access Sprout’s full library of social media dashboard templates.

The post 6 must-have social media dashboard templates for brands appeared first on Sprout Social.

What TikTok metrics you need to track for TikTok marketing in 2024

Brent Barnhart — Tue, 04 Jun 2024 15:43:07 +0000

If you haven’t been minding your TikTok metrics, now’s the time to start.

Especially as the app booms as a brand discovery and shopping channel. From organic and paid promotions to influencers and Shop, tracking TikTok analytics is a must-do for marketers.

The problem? Content moves fast on TikTok and the algorithm demands a high volume of videos.

But that’s all the more reason to keep a better pulse on your performance!

By knowing what’s working and what’s not, you can optimize your videos and strategy with confidence. Below we break down which TikTok metrics to prioritize and how to track them.

What are TikTok metrics?

TikTok metrics are data points that measure your videos’ performance and audience engagement. Through tracking metrics, you can uncover new opportunities to earn more views, fine-tune your TikTok marketing strategy and reach your target audience more effectively.

Like most social media metrics, you can track account-level and video-level analytics.

Here’s a snapshot of a few key TikTok metrics you can see natively in the app:

Growing and going viral on TikTok doesn’t happen totally by accident. Tracking performance goes hand in hand with higher engagement and understanding what viewers want from you.

What are the most valuable TikTok metrics for TikTok marketing?

Good question!

The performance insights provided by TikTok’s native analytics are a valuable source of information. Having a list of priority TikTok metrics can keep you from getting too into the weeds with your analytics.

Defining the best metrics to track will vary based on your goals. That said, below are a handful of the most important TikTok metrics to track regardless of your audience or industry. We’ll also highlight what these metrics look like when tracked using Sprout Social.

Engagement rate. This video metric measures the ratio of views to interactions (likes, comments, replies, shares and saves). Increasing TikTok engagement goes hand-in-hand with greater reach and visibility within the app’s algorithm.

Views. This metric measures the amount of times a video was watched. Keep in mind that TikTok views are counted as soon as a video starts or is automatically looped. Understanding which videos are earning the most views can highlight trending topics and future opportunities to create high-ranking content. Increasing your engagement rate and getting more views on TikTok can create a snowball effect of greater reach.
Followers growth. This account-level metric measures the rate at which your audience is growing based on the number of followers you’ve gained. While followers aren’t the most important TikTok metric on their own, increasing TikTok followers organically is a good sign. On the flip side, stagnant growth can be a signal to adjust your content strategy.

Click-through rate. This TikTok ad metric reflects how many people are tapping through and engaging with your ads versus total viewer impressions. Low click-through rates can be a sign of poor campaign targeting or ad creatives. On the flip side, strong click-through rates mean your ads are resonating with your target audience.
Shares. This metric tracks how often people repost your content or share videos independently with other users. Shares are a valuable TikTok metric for B2C brands by highlighting products featured in videos that are being bookmarked and discussed among viewers.
Audience demographics. This is a collection of TikTok metrics that covers the demographics (including the age, location and gender) of your viewership. Your social media demographics should reflect your target audience.
Trending hashtags. This metric measures how often hashtags are used on TikTok. For example, you can see which hashtags result in the most reach and engagement for your individual videos. You can also find trending hashtags in TikTok’s Creative Center to understand which topics are trending across the app.

How to find TikTok metrics in the TikTok app

You can use TikTok analytics to highlight a wide variety of account-level and video-level metrics.

Next, we’ll cover in-depth what you can measure and where in the app to find these numbers.

TikTok Key metrics

Key metrics provide a big-picture overview of your account and recent content’s performance.

Here’s how to access them within your TikTok profile:

From your profile, tap the ☰ menu. Select “Creator tools.”
Then, tap “View all” to see your account-level analytics in more detail (“Overview”).
In the “Overview” tab, you’ll see your TikTok Key metrics broken down by date range. You can view these metrics in 7-day, 28-day or 60-day increments (or set a custom timeframe).

TikTok metrics covered in this section of your analytics include:

Post views. This is how many times your posts were viewed.
Likes. This is the number of likes on your profile.
Comments. This is the number of comments your posts received.
Total views. This is the number of people who viewed your posts.
Shares. The number of times your posts were shared.

TikTok Content metrics

TikTok content metrics provide a video-level overview of your content’s reach and performance.
Here’s how to access them within your TikTok profile:

From your profile, tap the ☰ menu. Select “Creator tools.”
Then, tap “View all.”
Select the “Content” tab (to the right of “Overview”).
You’ll see a list of videos titled “Trending posts.” According to TikTok: “These are the top 9 posts with the fastest growth within the last 7 days.”
Select an individual video.

Under the “Video analysis” summary, you’ll see icons reflecting the following TikTok metrics for an individual video: likes, saves, comments, shares and saves.

You can drill down even further for individual videos by selecting the “Overview” tab.

Here’s a snapshot of the TikTok content metrics you can find in this dashboard:

Total play time. The cumulative amount of time viewers spent watching your video.
Average watch time. The average time people spent watching your video.
Watched full video %: The percentage of people who finished your entire video.
New followers. This is the number of viewers who started following you after interacting with your video.
Video views. This is the number of views your video earned. This is measured hourly for the first 48 hours up until 7 days after a video is posted.
Retention rate. This is the percentage of your viewers who are still watching your video at a particular time (measured in a range of seconds).
Traffic sources: This is where people find your video, including sources such as TikTok search or the “For You” page.

By selecting the “Viewers” tab, you can dive into viewer-level analytics for a video.

Total viewers. This is the total number of unique viewers for a video. This TikTok metric was formerly known as “Reached audience.”
Viewer types (new vs returning viewers, non-followers vs. followers). This breaks down your audience into segments based on past engagement.
Gender. This is the defined gender breakdown of a video’s viewers.
Age. This is the defined age breakdown of a video’s viewers.
Location. This is the defined geographic location breakdown of a video’s viewers.

Finally, you can find even more data under the “Engagement” tab:

Top words used in comments. This measures most frequently words and phrases that appear in your TikTok comments.
Likes. This measures the percentage of people who liked your videos at a particular point (measured in seconds) within a video.

TikTok Follower metrics

TikTok Follower metrics provide an overview of your account and audience growth over time.

Here’s how to access them within your TikTok account:

From your profile, tap the ☰ menu. Select “Creator tools.”
Then, tap “View all.”
Select the “Followers” tab (to the right of “Content”).

Here’s a snapshot of what you can see within your TikTok follower metrics. Keep in mind that you need at least 100 followers to have full access to this data:

Total followers. This is the total number of people following your account for a specified period.
Net followers. This shows the net number of followers gained in a selected date range and comparison with the previous period.
Follower insights. This is a demographic breakdown of your followers.
Most active times. This is the average time your followers are active on TikTok broken down by hours and days.

How to use TikTok metrics to achieve your goals on TikTok

All of the data above can be eye-opening, especially when it comes to your audience and top-performing content.

But how do you turn your TikTok metrics into action?

To wrap things up, here are three ways to translate your data into actual business impact.

1. Uncover top-performing video formats

As noted earlier, content moves fast on TikTok.

Marketers have to experiment to figure out what works and what doesn’t. This means publishing videos of varying lengths and formats with different creative edits. For example, do your viewers engage with unpolished and off-the-cuff content? Do they prefer shorter-form or longer videos?

Answering these questions and beyond starts by looking at your TikTok metrics. Rather than frantically scrambling for video ideas, you can use your numbers to guide you toward video formats that resonate with your audience.

You can make your metrics part of a TikTok audit to assess your overall content strategy. Chances are you’ll find outliers and common trends between videos that earn the highest engagement and watch times. TikTok’s trending content tab makes it especially easy to find these videos in a matter of seconds. You can use these insights to repeat successful formats again and again.

2. Find a posting frequency that maximizes reach and engagement

Compared to other platforms, TikTok’s content demands can feel aggressive and daunting.

However, businesses and brands don’t necessarily need to overwhelm themselves to find an “optimal” publishing frequency on TikTok.

In fact, your native TikTok metrics are the best indicators for the best times to post on TikTok and how many videos per week earn the most engagement based on your individual audience.

Given how stretched marketing teams are right now, you have to allocate your time and resources carefully. Rather than meet some arbitrary daily posting requirement, consider that you can earn as much (if not more) engagement by cutting your posting frequency in half. You’ll never know until you look at your numbers.

3. Clarify and align your brand’s TikTok goals

Some brands are active on TikTok “just because.”

Of course, adopting a social platform for the sake of it is a recipe for off-course content and poor performance.

Consider how you can align your social media goals with your TikTok metrics and presence. For example, are you purely building brand awareness? Driving conversions and traffic?

Your goals will ultimately determine which metrics you benchmark and measure over time. Not to mention how you approach your content and engagement strategy. This again highlights why it’s important to have your priority TikTok metrics available at a glance to make decisions holistically.

Have you dug into your TikTok metrics yet?

Tracking TikTok metrics is still unexplored territory for many businesses and brands.

But there’s so much you can learn from your data if you take the time to dig into it. From driving leads to building awareness, a pulse on your numbers can help you move the needle ASAP.

If you haven’t already, check out how Sprout Social’s TikTok integration helps brands manage their TikTok analytics and content from end to end.

The post What TikTok metrics you need to track for TikTok marketing in 2024 appeared first on Sprout Social.

2 nonprofit social marketers share how they build & measure their social media strategies

Rachael Goulet — Thu, 30 May 2024 14:08:39 +0000

As someone who’s worked in social media for over a decade, I wholeheartedly believe it’s always possible to measure the value of social and the tangible ways it impacts your larger strategy. But that doesn’t mean there’s a perfect way to calculate it—or that it’s easy.

With different business models, goals and highly scrutinized budgets, nonprofit social teams in particular seem to be under more pressure to champion their work. I interviewed Ryane Ridenour, Director of Social Media at Everytown for Gun Safety, and Meghan Nguyen, Digital Associate at the Innocence Project, to find out if that’s true, and understand how their social strategies play a pivotal role in achieving their nonprofit organizations’ missions.

Why a strong social media strategy is critical for nonprofits

Rachael Goulet (Sprout Social): Social media is where audiences spend their time, and is a primary channel for discoverability—that’s true for nonprofit, B2B and B2C brands alike. How does social serve your mission?

Meghan Nguyen (The Innocence Project): We’ve activated more than 4 million people on social. We’ve prompted them to make donations, visit our website, call legislators, sign petitions and demand justice.

For example, back in 2022, we were trying to get a woman named Melissa Lucio off of death row in Texas. She was clearly innocent. We activated our followers to call politicians to urge them to take her off of death row. Two days before her execution date, they offered an indefinite stay of execution. We couldn’t have done it without our followers and influencers. We have seen how impactful social media is for fostering live-saving connections. It’s a tool more nonprofits should use to activate their mission.

Rachael Goulet: That’s an incredible example. Why social? What does social media offer that traditional channels can’t?

Ryane Ridenour (Everytown for Gun Safety): On social, we have a mouthpiece that speaks directly to the public. We rapidly respond to gun violence, and make sure folks know daily gun violence is a problem. Not just the mass shootings that make headlines.

We try to educate folks on what’s happening with gun safety—both locally and nationally—and provide a community for people advocating for the cause. We want to make our work accessible and keep it top of mind even when daily gun violence isn’t making the news. Not everyone has the time or energy to give. Even if we encourage someone to send a message to their lawmaker, maybe next time they’ll do something bigger.

The most important metrics for measuring nonprofit social media ROI

Rachael Goulet: There’s still a widespread belief that brands don’t have a way to prove the success of social. But they can. It just requires figuring out which goals matter most to you and your organization. Which metrics do you use to measure ROI?

Meghan Nguyen: A lot of our goals at the Innocence Project have to do with growth. We want to grow our community of donors and advocates by at least 5% in 2024. But what’s been really apparent is that we should prioritize engagement over follower growth. Looking at engagement rate helps us make sure we have a loyal audience that’s returning to our page. It’s really important to create content that encourages interaction and leads to meaningful connections with our followers, rather than solely focusing on growing the number of followers we have. Quality engagement leads to stronger relationships, loyalty and often delivers better results than simply having a high follower count with low engagement.

We also work really closely with our digital fundraising team. By tracking links, we can see how much we’ve raised directly from social media.

Ryane Ridenour: Clicks and link attribution clearly demonstrate hard impacts, like: Are we bringing new people into the fold? Are they engaged by this work? Is our community energized and excited to take action with us?

Even when people aren’t clicking links on social, we know it’s one of many channels where we’re asking them to take action. It’s contributing to the performance of other digital channels, like email marketing.

Tips for getting leadership buy-in on your nonprofit social media strategy

Rachael Goulet: Does leadership understand how your team goals funnel up to your overall mission?

Meghan Nguyen: We’re lucky. We’re a large, well-known nonprofit. We have a lot of resources, and our leaders understand the power of social. They know how social media can translate to dollars, and how it can have a meaningful impact in the space of social justice, including galvanizing our followers to call legislators or sign petitions.

Ryane Ridenour: In the nonprofit space, social media can be trivialized, even though we’re meeting people where they are. Nonprofits are forced to be scrappy because most of our resources are allocated to the mission.

Rachael Goulet: How do you get buy-in from stakeholders? What kind of performance reports or summaries resonate with them?

Ryane Ridenour: Sprout Social helps us tell a cohesive story of our data across platforms. We can see what’s working and what’s not, which helps us demonstrate impact and secure buy-in. In the past, we would only report on bigger moments (i.e., campaigns), but now we’ve gotten to the point where we send weekly reports of audience trends, video views, engagements and more. The reports link to our top performing posts. It helps us illustrate where we should invest resources.

Meghan Nguyen: We prioritize getting everyone on the same page. We have weekly meetings with leaders on our team, and regular meetings with our executives. We demonstrate our ROI through presentations that clearly illustrate concrete impact.

Rachael Goulet: As someone who’s worked in social for over a decade, I’ve learned that saying “we’re just too busy” doesn’t work when it comes to advocating for more resources. Instead, it’s been much more helpful to say “here’s what we could be doing if we had more resources.” I’m sure that’s even more challenging in the nonprofit space where possibilities are endless with more funding. When you ask for more resources for emerging platforms or formats, what’s your go-to approach?

Ryane Ridenour: We used social listening to make the case for increasing our investments in video. We demonstrated the “share of video content” created by our allies (a small fraction) compared to the huge ecosystem of content created by our opposition. It was such a tangible way to show the gap, and help us secure more resources.

Rachael Gouletr: Wow, that’s such a cool way to use Listening!

Meghan Nguyen: We frame requests around specific opportunities we want to seize, like establishing a presence on emerging platforms like Threads or TikTok. Our resources are limited, so we focus on platforms that offer the most promising ROI due to their highly engaged user bases. We pitched them to leadership by explaining that advocates on these platforms can help us achieve our goals. Ultimately, we have to align the value of any platform with our target audience, campaign objectives and tangible outcomes.

What the future holds for nonprofit social marketers

Rachael Goulet: How do you think your organizations will be measuring social ROI 5+ years from now? Will it be easier or harder to pinpoint social’s direct impact on fundraising and other goals?

Ryane Ridenour: A lot is up in the air right now in the social landscape. I would hope that our tools are even more robust, integrated and centralized. It’s also still really hard to measure how much social instigates cultural shifts, and the ROI around them. But if we are doing our jobs right, we are changing the culture around what safety means.

Rachael Goulet: That is such an interesting use case for social listening in terms of seeing how specific terms are talked about, and watching how the culture and conversations shift over time. There could be goals you create around share of voice for certain keywords.

Meghan Nguyen: Looking ahead, we will refine our approach to measuring ROI. We haven’t yet fully taken advantage of advanced analytics tools. But we want to use social listening to understand how people are talking about us and tap into sentiment analysis.

We will have to continuously stay up-to-date on platform changes. It will probably only get more complex as algorithms evolve and new laws are passed, but we are prepared to continually adjust. When one door closes, another will open. The only certainty is that things will change, so we will have to change with them.

Building community on social is mission-critical

Thank you so much to Ryane and Meghan for pulling back the curtain on their approaches, and allowing us to see the strategy behind building a nonprofit social presence and communicating the value of social internally.

It’s clear both Everytown and the Innocence Project leverage social media to activate communities, facilitate meaningful connections and drive tangible outcomes such as fundraising and advocacy. Their robust social media strategies play a crucial role in advancing their missions.

Looking for more insight into the unique opportunity social offers nonprofits? Read our guide to finding social media management tools that empower nonprofit marketing teams to maximize their mission.

The post 2 nonprofit social marketers share how they build & measure their social media strategies appeared first on Sprout Social.

40 Twitter (X) stats to know in marketing in 2024

Jacqueline Zote — Wed, 22 May 2024 14:36:00 +0000

From celebrity news to election discussions—there’s only one place to go to keep up with what’s going on around the world. Despite significant changes, Twitter (rebranded as “X”) is still the hub of trending conversations. So understanding how people use the platform will help you tap into current events and emerging trends. This requires staying up-to-date on the latest Twitter stats to inform your approach.

When you have access to the latest social media stats about the platform, you can understand how to best engage your audience. This is crucial if you want to attract more followers and grow your X community.

The 2023 Sprout Social Index™ found that 45% of consumers follow a brand on social for their enjoyable and entertaining content. Staying on top of Twitter statistics will show you the types of content and topics that drive engagement.

While platforms like Facebook and Instagram might have more users, X’s audience is active, engaged and plugged in. And for brands, it is a valuable channel to connect with their audience.

Check out these 40 Twitter statistics to inspire and guide your social media strategy this year.

General Twitter (X) stats every marketer should know

Number of users worldwide: 415 million
Monthly active users: 335.7 million
Worldwide usage ranking: 12^th most popular social network
Annual user growth rate: 5% decline
Ownership: Privately held

X is at a unique crossroads. For one thing, new ownership has spurred renewed interest in the platform and increased user activity. At the same time, the platform has seen major upheavals including a complete rebranding and a monthly fee for verification.

These changes are driving some users away from the platform, leading to a decrease in monthly active users. According to projections, the number of monthly active users will drop to 335.7 million in 2024.

(Pro tip: Use Twitter analytics tools to track if these changes are affecting your brand’s audience performance.)

In line with this trend, the platform will also see a decline in annual user growth rate. In 2023, Statista reported a 4% decrease in monthly active users on X. For 2024, the platform is likely to see a 5% decline in monthly active users.

However, the latest Statista reports show that the platform still has a total of 415 million users worldwide. That means more than 80% of X’s total registered users use the platform every month.

But keep in mind that X is still in a transition stage, so don’t discount the platform just yet. As the 12^th most popular social media network, it remains a major player in the social media game.

Source: Statista

Twitter (X) usage statistics that prove the platform’s impact

Monetizable daily active users: 237.8 million
Average daily usage: 34.1 minutes
Worldwide daily engagement ranking: Third most-used social network
Number of monthly website visits: 6.2 billion
Median engagement rate: 0.029%
Median number of Tweets per week: 3.31
Top content preference on X: Informative
Number of X users using it as a news source: 53%

In spite of the decline in monthly active users, daily active usage on X is seeing an increase. According to the latest available data, there were 237.8 million monetizable daily active users on the platform in Q2 of 2022. That’s more than 57% of the platform’s users logging in daily.

This marked an increase from the previous quarter, where it had 229 million monetizable daily active users.

The good news is that X’s daily time spent continues to stay about the same. People are spending an average of 34.1 minutes per day on the platform. This makes it the third most used social network, surpassing Instagram.

For context, people are spending 33.1 minutes on Instagram each day, a platform that far surpasses X in popularity. And Facebook, in spite of having the largest number of monthly active users, only sees about 30.9 minutes of daily usage.

So there’s no denying X has the potential to help brands grow their communities by gaining new, highly-engaged followers.

Source: Statista

In line with the growing X usage statistics, visits to the Twitter.com website have also seen an increase. For the month of December 2023, there were 6.2 billion visits to the website. In the previous month, there had been 5.9 billion visits to the website.

At the same time, engagement rate and Tweet frequency on the platform are on the decline. RivalIQ’s study revealed a 20% decline in engagement rate. Now the median engagement rate on X is 0.029% across all industries.

For the time being, brand accounts are also Tweeting much less frequently. The median Tweet frequency was 3.31 Tweets per week—a 15% decrease from the previous year.

But this doesn’t negate the platform’s role in driving conversations around trending topics. X continues to be the top source of news among all social media sites. A 2023 study found that 53% of the platform’s users regularly use it to get news.

This finding is in line with X users having a preference for information-type content on the platform. About 55% of users prefer to see informative content, making it the most preferred content type. Additionally, users show a preference for relevant, engaging and trendy content. As such, brands using the platform can make a mark by participating in trending conversations.

Source: Statista

Twitter (X) user statistics to help reach your audience

Gender distribution: 60.9% male, 39.1% female (Note: Sprout Social acknowledges gender isn’t binary, but our data sources limit their reporting to male and female.)
Men are more likely to reach out to brands on X
Age distribution: 36.6% between the ages of 25 and 34
Top locations: United States, Japan, India
Cross-platform usage: Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook
Education level and income: 29% are college graduates and make more than $100,000 annually
Top community: Suburban
Sentiment trends: 33% have a favorable impression
Reaction to the new X logo: 33.57% neutral

To maximize your chance of reaching your target audience on X, you need to understand the demographic breakdown of its user base.

The platform tends to sway male, with 60.9% of users identifying as such. Male X users are also most likely to reach out to brands on the platform. A Khoros study found that 81% of male X users have reached out to a brand on the platform. The number is lower among female users with 68% having done the same.

X’s popularity among the Millennial population hasn’t dwindled. It’s most popular with people between the ages of 25 and 34 years old, and least popular with teens. Users within this age range are also most active on Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook.

Pew Research Center’s study on social media demographics noted that 29% of U.S. X users are college graduates. About 49% of the platform’s user base earns more than $70,000 annually while 29% make more than $100,000 annually. This highlights the platform’s highly-educated and high-earning base.

Moreover, X sees the most usage among suburban communities (26%). Urban communities follow close behind at 25%.

Countries leading in X usage include the U.S., Japan and India.

X’s core users loudly express their feelings about the platform. Many have raised concerns about platform glitches, new features, privacy and proposed paywalls. While Twitter sentiment has ebbed and flowed, most users are pulling for the platform to regain its wings.

In fact, 33% of U.S. adults still have a favorable impression of the platform. Additionally, 40% of users expressed that they’re likely to still use X in a year’s time.

Changes such as the platform’s new logo didn’t garner many negative reactions. One-quarter of respondents felt positively about it. Meanwhile, 33.57% had a neutral feeling about the rebranding.

Twitter (X) statistics for advertisers

Annual ad revenue: $2.98 billion
Ad engagement: 7% increase from 2021 to 2022
Cost per engagement: 10% increase from 2021 to 2022
Average ad cost (per first action): $0.26 – $0.50
Average ad cost (per follow): $1.01 – $2.00
Industry inclusivity: Only major social platform to allow cannabis advertising

Advertising on Twitter takes multiple forms. This includes promoted Tweets, accounts and trending topics among many others. The platform strives to continuously roll out new high-impact ad types to meet evolving consumer behavior.

In spite of this, ad revenue on the platform has witnessed a decline in the past couple of years.

As a result of the drop in monthly active users, there’s a looming uncertainty over the platform’s financial health. A March 2023 forecast predicted that the platform will generate $2.98 in ad revenue. While this would be a 27.9% drop compared to the previous year, the decline will slow down in 2024 according to the same projections. X hasn’t published updated revenue data supporting or challenging these forecasts.

Source: Oberlo

Meanwhile, additional sources report a 7% increase in X ad engagement between 2021 and 2022. With this engagement boost, the cost of advertising on the platform also increased. There was a 10% increase in cost per engagement during the same period.

In spite of this, the ad cost is comparable to Facebook and still significantly lower than LinkedIn. The typical cost per first action or cost per click on X is $0.26 to $0.50. meanwhile, LinkedIn has a cost per click of $2 to $3. Additionally, brands can expect to spend around $1.01 to $2 per follow for promoted accounts on X.

From offering discounted ads to allowing cannabis advertising, X is making attractive appeals for brands to reinvest in the platform. (If your brand sells cannabis, bookmark our article: How cannabis brands elevate their social media content.)

Twitter (X) stats businesses need to inform their strategy

Best time to post: Mondays and Fridays from 10 a.m. to noon and Tuesdays through Thursdays from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Posting frequency for top brands: 3.75x per week
Engagement rate for top brands: 0.102%
Percentage of Tweets with emojis: 26.7%
Discoverability: #1 platform
X users are 2x more likely to have made an in-app purchase
X users are 36% more likely to be the first to try new things
Number of users who’ve engaged with a brand: 75%
Top engagement intent: Customer care
64% of X users prefer sending a message than calling a business
Expected response time: Three hours or less
One-third of users made a purchase after a positive experience on X

When you build your Twitter marketing strategy, it’s imperative to align your content with the style of the network. For example, X is a fast-moving platform, and your Tweets are easy to miss if you post at the wrong time. Overall, the best times to post are Mondays and Fridays from 10 a.m. to noon. Tuesdays through Thursdays from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. are also good times to post. But you should find the best time to post on Twitter for your industry and audience.

By sending out your Tweets at the best time, you can catch your audience when they’re most active. This allows you to drive higher engagements for your brand’s X account.

For context, RivalIQ reports that the top brands on X have an engagement rate of about 0.102%. So anything around this range should be a good engagement rate on the platform. Moreover, they Tweet at a frequency of 3.75 times per week.

If you’re looking to get more engagements, make sure to throw in several emojis in your Tweets to make them stand out. Between 2013 and 2023, the platform has seen a significant increase in the number of posts containing emojis. Now 26.7% of Tweets worldwide have an emoji.

Despite a low brand engagement rate, X is the number one platform for discoverability. And its superpower is helping brands gain exposure to an audience eager to try something new. According to X, 36% of people on the platform are more likely to be the first to buy new products. They’re also twice as likely to have made an in-app purchase compared to users on other platforms.

Consumers aren’t just on the platform for Twitter ecommerce, though. The previously cited Khoros study found that 75% of X users have engaged with a brand on the platform. Among these, the top engagement intent was customer care with 53% of users reaching out to resolve care-related issues.

This makes it the top social media platform for seeking customer care. The latest social media customer service stats also show that 64% of X users would rather reach out to a brand on X than call the business.

Source: Khoros

These numbers highlight how crucial it is for brands to provide assistance to their customers on the platform. But not just any assistance would do. Consumers are expecting brands to provide a swift response to their care-related issues.

The Khoros study reveals that 50% of X users expect a response to their complaint within three hours. This is regardless of whether they shared a complaint publicly or in a private message. Meeting this expected timeframe could improve loyalty to your brand. 45% of users also become more receptive to the brand’s advertisements.

Source: Khoros

In fact, a positive Twitter customer service experience could drive purchase decisions. One-third of X users would buy a product or service after a positive customer experience on the platform.

Use Twitter marketing statistics to help your brand soar

These key Twitter statistics prove the platform could still play a vital role in your brand’s social media strategy. But like all social media platforms, your brand’s performance on X is what you make it.

Even in the midst of the platform’s evolution, you can find stability and success if you ground your strategy in data. Use the 40 Twitter stats we shared in this article to refine your tactics to better resonate with your target audience.

Start asking yourself questions like:

Is my target audience using X more or less than I anticipated?
What does my target audience use X for?
What is my brand’s return on paid investment on the platform?
Am I reaching my audience at the best time?
Is my company’s X customer service workflow meeting expectations?

Use your answers to guide your company’s approach to the platform in 2024, and watch your presence take off. Keep iterating on your strategy with the latest tools and features to best use Twitter for business.

The post 40 Twitter (X) stats to know in marketing in 2024 appeared first on Sprout Social.

Why you need to share an executive summary of your social media reports with leadership

Ronnie Gomez — Wed, 08 May 2024 14:00:26 +0000

All great content has a hook—something that grabs the viewer’s attention while driving meaningful engagement. Think of your social media strategy’s executive summary as the “hook” for your performance reports. It highlights clear, digestible insights that capture your leadership team’s attention while demonstrating your work’s value.

A well-received social media report can lay the groundwork for more resources, recognition and trust. In this guide, we share how to draft executive summaries that communicate social’s impact in a concise and compelling way.

P.S. If you want to fast-track report setup, use our social media scorecard template. Fill it in with your own data for a C-suite ready overview of your brand health and social strategy.

Download the Template

Why executive summaries matter to your social reporting strategy

To most social marketers, metrics like impressions, engagements, conversions and clicks require little to no explanation. These are the numbers you probably already monitor regularly to measure your social performance and identify areas for improvement.

While these metrics may make complete sense to you and your team, things like follower count and reach are as good as gibberish to an executive unfamiliar with the nuances of your social strategy. If they can’t see the impact of social on business goals, how can they see the value in social at all?

A strong executive summary bridges knowledge gaps at the executive level by translating raw data into a concise narrative that can resonate with leaders—including C-suite executives. It makes your insights and recommendations more accessible, increasing the likelihood that stakeholders will engage with and act upon the information provided.

3 reasons to upgrade your reports with social media summaries

At first, you might think of social media executive summaries as just another task for your to do list. However, when you look at the bigger picture, you’ll see it’s a little task that can save a lot of time. Here’s how:

They earn executive buy-in

When leadership can’t immediately connect how social influences different parts of the business, they’re less likely to throw their support behind the social team’s efforts.

We asked social marketers how they plan to connect the value of social to business goals in 2024 in our latest Sprout Social Index™ report. More than half (60%) plan to quantify the value of social media engagement in terms of potential revenue impact.

A standard social report can contain dozens of unique KPIs. Each has their own importance, but only a select few ladder up to your unique business goals. An executive summary creates space to spotlight those metrics so their impact is crystal clear.

Capitalizing on these opportunities to communicate results can help secure executive buy-in when it’s time to ask for things like additional budget and resources. Suppose you want to increase your budget for a paid social campaign. You stand a much better chance of winning your finance executive over if you can show them how your social campaigns are performing and measure the return on investment.

There’s power in personalization

Social media is no longer exclusive to your marketing team. Leaders across customer care, product development, human resources and more now have a stake in your social strategy. When it comes to results, they’re all looking for something different.

Executive summaries can tailor your reports to the expectations of several unique audiences, so you can accurately showcase your impact. Sprout’s My Reports tool–part of our Premium Analytics–allows teams to scale this process through the power of annotations. Users can create team-specific text annotations that provide rich context on strategic goals and big wins as they relate to the collaborator’s discipline.

Once those notes are set, you can share several different versions of the same report using links based on custom reporting views. In such reports, when a customer care leader clicks their unique link, they might see engagement and team activity metrics, paired with a written update on feedback from recent NPS surveys shared via Facebook and Instagram. Your sales leader, on the other hand, will see organic and paid click-through and conversion rates along with a recap of trending products.

If you’re not using Sprout, you can still recreate this effect with some more time and effort. For example, if you share reports via spreadsheet, you can make several copies and use the first tab of each for tailored summaries.

They start conversations

Over time, a detailed report can socialize the power of social media with even the most offline business leaders. Communicating your social results on a regular cadence eliminates any ambiguity in your social strategy and ensures executives are always looped in on relevant efforts.

All of this works in tandem to elevate your company’s social media maturity. When leaders have the right context, they can ask the right questions and provide the right amount of support. Over time, this will refine your strategy and strengthen your skills as a marketer.

Evolving social media discussions happening within your organization is the first step to evolving your brand’s approach to social media. Social media strategy executive summaries are the perfect way to start the dialogue.

Craft a social media strategy executive summary that gets noticed

Armed with an executive summary of your social media report, you can convince even the most skeptical executives about the impact social can have on your business. All you have to do is make reporting and data sharing a regular habit.

Use these social media scorecard templates to get a head start on your next executive update. Just compile your data, conduct your analysis and fill them in. You’ll be left with an engaging, C-suite-ready report that will keep leaders up-to-date on social’s impact on your organization.

The post Why you need to share an executive summary of your social media reports with leadership appeared first on Sprout Social.

TikTok monitoring tools to protect your brand and scale your social strategy

Jamia Kenan — Tue, 07 May 2024 13:00:59 +0000

Harnessing the power of TikTok is crucial for staying relevant and engaging with many audiences. The TikTok comments section alone is ripe with information brands can use to form stronger connections and improve their product or services.

But navigating the dynamic landscape of TikTok can be challenging. That’s where TikTok monitoring comes into play. By utilizing social media monitoring tools that offer advanced TikTok analytics, brands gain valuable insights to steer their strategies in the right direction. In this guide, we’ll define TikTok monitoring, why it’s so valuable, how to do it and six TikTok monitoring tools you can use.

What is TikTok monitoring?

TikTok monitoring is the process of tracking and responding to social engagements to understand target audiences and protect your brand reputation. These engagements include @-mentions, comments, TikTok hashtags and keywords related to your brand. Monitoring should be a key aspect of your overall TikTok marketing strategy. However, social media practitioners face one common challenge when it comes to monitoring on the TikTok app: you can only track mentions that directly tag your brand. To see all the conversations about their business on TikTok, many brands use social media monitoring tools.

Why TikTok monitoring is valuable for brands

TikTok monitoring is a form of brand monitoring that gives insight into what your audience thinks about your business and product and services. By using a TikTok monitoring tool, you can conduct customer sentiment analysis to gauge feedback and understand the overall perception of your brand. TikTok monitoring involves analyzing shares, likes, comments and other engagements, which are direct reflections of audience opinions. Monitoring TikTok also strengthens reputation management because you can keep a close eye on potential crises and respond to questions, concerns and critiques promptly.

What important features to look for in a TikTok monitoring tool

Social monitoring tools empower you to discover and view every TikTok mention, even if your brand isn’t directly tagged. They help brands identify and define relevant keywords you want to track for monitoring. Here are some key things to look for when choosing a TikTok monitoring tool for your business:

Artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities: AI and automation is necessary for processing large amounts of data and extracting data-backed insights. A TikTok monitoring tool with advanced AI can automatically categorize user interactions and engagements.
Automated or customized reporting: An effective TikTok monitoring tool will offer the ability to customize or automate reports. Automated reports save you time, and it makes sharing valuable information to your team and stakeholders easier and faster.
Real-time monitoring: Social media is always evolving, so opt for tools that offer real-time monitoring capabilities that enable you to address trends, user engagements and potential crises swiftly.
Integrations: An ideal monitoring tool should integrate seamlessly with the other marketing and analytics platforms in your tech stack. It also allows for a more unified approach to data management.

6 best TikTok monitoring tools

There are a lot of social monitoring tools to choose from. Let’s review six of our top recommendations for platforms with TikTok monitoring tools:

1. Sprout Social

Sprout’s robust suite of solutions ensures you never lose track of your important conversations on TikTok. Using our Smart Inbox for TikTok monitoring aggregates all your interactions into a centralized feed for your team to manage comments and mentions. Set up faster workflows with AI-powered automation and alert customer care agents in real time to the most important messages with Sprout’s Case Management solution.

Sprout also offers in-depth analytics and automated, customized reports so you can share top insights within minutes.

2. Emplifi

Emplifi is a customer engagement platform that offers a range of solutions including TikTok monitoring. The platform offers AI-powered spike alerts to notify any anomalies in online activity so you can navigate a social media crisis quickly and efficiently. Emplifi offers omni channel dashboard and custom displays to make sharing insights across your team and to stakeholders easier.

3. Brandwatch

Brandwatch is a social media analytics platform offering social monitoring capabilities for TikTok. It enables users to get an analysis of social conversations and mentions. You can create customized dashboards to help track and measure the performance of your social marketing efforts. Along with customized dashboards, the platform offers AI smart alerts so you can respond to spikes or drops in brand mentions.

4. Talkwalker

Talkwalker is a consumer intelligence platform providing a range of solutions including social media monitoring. The platform offers hashtag tracking and data visualization tools to help visualize and contextualize topics across social media including TikTok. You can monitor mentions in real time for social media, but it also scrolls blogs, media publications, forums and videos.

5. Mention

Mention is another TikTok monitoring tool brands can use to keep a pulse on conversations. As its name implies, the platform offers a strong @-mention tracker that monitors over one billion sources. Mention offers a variety of filtering options to help practitioners sift through the noise and identify the most relevant mentions and comments. Similar to the other platforms in our list, Mention offers alerts for mention volume and customized reports.

6. Awario

Awario is a social media and brand monitoring tool that crawls over 13 billion web pages daily. They are a good option for brands of all sizes and offer various upgrades to customize to your business’s needs. Along with tracking mentions, you can use Awario to discover influencers and brand advocates and identify your share of voice on social media. Essentially, you can use this software to see who and where your brand is being talked about the most on social media.

How to monitor TikTok for your brand

Follow these steps to monitor your brand on TikTok:

1. Define your goals and metrics

Ground your monitoring by establishing clear goals and determining which metrics are most relevant to your brand. Consider what you want to accomplish through monitoring TikTok. For example, do you want to keep an eye on how your competitors, focus on a specific campaign or better understand your target audience in general? Once you set goals, you can select which metrics you’ll use to measure success.

2. Monitor relevant keywords for your brand

Pay attention to specific keywords related to your industry and brand. These keywords can include anything from specific features and product names, industry phrases, popular hashtags and competitor names.

For instance, this image shows a word cloud with top keywords, hashtags and mentions in Sprout’s platform. In this example, a coffee chain might monitor keywords like “espresso,” “cup of joe,” “latte” or “barista recs” to pinpoint rising conversation within the industry.

3. Monitor customer sentiment

Review customer sentiment analysis to get a granular understanding of what your audiences are saying and feeling about your brand. Tools like Sprout analyze positive, negative and neutral sentiment to give you an overview of your customers’ opinions. Some TikTok monitoring tools give you a sentiment score to help you quantify that metric. Use a sentiment analysis score to adjust your strategy, improve customer satisfaction and overall perception of your brand.

4. Monitor your competitors performance

After reviewing relevant keywords and customer sentiment, seek out how your competitors are doing on TikTok. Competitive analysis empowers you to differentiate yourself from the crowd, so it’s important to avoid only monitoring your brand. Tracking your competitors’ engagement rates, interactions and response rates helps you uncover what’s working for them, while presenting gaps in their strategy that your brand can fill.

In Sprout, you can view automated reports to help you monitor your competition and benchmark performance across various social channels.

5. Evolve your TikTok monitoring strategy

As you learn more from your insights, the more you will need to adapt your TikTok monitoring strategy. For example, you might discover new conversations from your audience or new competitors. Remain flexible and use your TikTok monitoring tools to stay ahead.

Protect your online reputation with a TikTok monitoring tool

Using a TikTok monitoring tool will help you learn more about your target audiences and competitors, so you can strengthen your social media presence and brand reputation. Experience and explore Sprout’s TikTok monitoring tools and sign up for a free, 30-day trial.

The post TikTok monitoring tools to protect your brand and scale your social strategy appeared first on Sprout Social.

The social media metrics to track in 2024 (and why)

Carly Hill — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 19:40:34 +0000

Social media involves the ultimate balancing act of the creative and the analytical. But if creativity is the intriguing icing on the cake, social media metrics are the essential ingredients to bringing the final dish to life.

There’s no one “magic” metric to measure. Marketers must depend on a healthy blend of multiple metrics to illustrate how social media impacts the entire business. And the social media metrics that will be crucial to your strategy and reporting will depend on your brand, business goals and strategy.

Just as social media is constantly in flux, so too are the metrics that prove to be most important in your larger strategy. In this article, we’ll walk through some of the key metrics social teams are focusing on now, and how to break down silos with your social media analytics and reporting strategy.

What are social media metrics?
Why is measuring social media engagement metrics important?
10 types of social media metrics marketers are prioritizing more
Social media measurement tips for painless reporting
Tools for tracking social media metrics
Hone in on the social media metrics that matter most

What are social media metrics?

Social media metrics are points of data essential to tracking the performance of your social channels, content, strategy and the impact it all has on your business goals.

Measuring social media engagement metrics, for example, can allow for a comprehensive understanding of how your content resonates with your audience and provide invaluable insights to help identify opportunities to better resonate with them.

Without a deep dive into these metrics, one would not be able to identify invaluable insights, such as engagement metrics scoring low. Without that understanding, the opportunity to discover how to refine a brand’s social media marketing campaign to better resonate with its defined buyer personas in its social content would be lost.

Not to mention, larger business opportunities can sometimes be discovered through the analysis of social media metrics, such as identifying a new market segment.

To keep an agile strategy and uncover insights that feed your entire organization, social media measurement isn’t a nice-to-have—it’s a must.

For a full list of social media metrics sorted by funnel stage, download our social media metrics map.

Download the social media metrics map

Why is measuring social media engagement metrics important?

Measuring social media metrics has implications that extend far beyond social. Social media data is business intelligence that informs brand health, competitive standing and ideal performance benchmarks. So much so that, according to The 2023 State of Social Media report, over half of business leaders say that social media data and insights currently inform their company’s business strategy.

It also helps you clearly illustrate the value of social and your ROI—which is one of the greatest challenges for social media teams, according to The 2023 Sprout Social Index™.

10 types of social media metrics marketers are prioritizing more

Your social media goals determine which metrics matter to you. But the metrics social pros are focusing on can help guide where to focus your efforts.

In a Q2 2023 Sprout pulse survey of 255 social marketers, we asked how much marketers are weighing certain metrics in 2023 vs. 2022. These are the metrics they indicated were being weighed more heavily this year.

Let’s dig deeper into what each of these metrics categories can do for your strategy and business, and related metrics in each category to consider prioritizing.

Audience growth metrics
Metrics to monitor customer satisfaction
Awareness metrics
Metrics for customer retention
Metrics for social media ROI
Brand health metrics
Social media engagement metrics
Paid social media metrics

Audience growth metrics

Follower count is often discounted as a vanity metric. But follower growth tells a more complete story about your channel’s health, the awareness you’re building and whether you’re outpacing competitors—or falling behind.

Here are a few audience growth metrics to track:

Follower growth

Your follower growth measures the net new followers you gained in a specific time period. Simply subtract how many followers you had at the beginning of a time period from the amount of followers you have now.

While follower count on its own won’t tell you much, knowing how many followers you gained is a powerful way to prove the ROI of content types, campaigns and social media experiments.

Analytics automation tools cut out the calculation process so you can focus on the insights that help you prove ROI. For example, look at how Sprout Social’s Instagram Profile Report helps you visualize your audience growth, and calculates your net growth for you:

Follower growth rate

Follower growth rate is a percentage that shows you how quickly your audience is actually growing—or slowing—within a certain time period.

Here’s how this is calculated: (Followers you gained in a specific time / the initial number of followers you had prior to that gain) x 100

For example, let’s say you had 10,000 followers at the beginning of June. By the end, you have 10,200 followers. You would calculate your growth rate like this: (200 / 10,000) x 100 = 2% growth rate.

Audience size

As I mentioned, this is often disregarded as a vanity metric. But this is likely because it’s looked at on its own, rather than in the larger context of performance and channel health.

Keeping track of changes to your follower count monthly, quarterly and yearly is an important data point that fuels the higher-level metrics we just mentioned.

Metrics to monitor customer satisfaction

Conversations on social media reveal valuable information about what is and isn’t working with your content, customer care, brand, products and more. Here are a few proactive metrics to monitor for customer satisfaction:

Reply time

Being responsive on social is key to building community, and serving your customers. Almost three-quarters of consumers expect a response within 24 hours, according to The Sprout Social Index™.

That’s why your reply time is one of the most important customer service metrics to measure. It measures how long it takes for your team to reply to a customer message on social.

The best way to quantify this metric is with a tool. For example, Sprout’s Internal Reports, like the Inbox Team Report, calculate team performance metrics like Average Reply Time for you.

Total response volume

Total Response Volume is the number of responses your team sends to customers.

Unanswered messages on social create a frustrating customer experience. Tracking customer service metrics, like this one, help you improve your customer care experience by identifying how many messages are being missed.

Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)

Your CSAT indicates how satisfied customers are with your products, services or brand and business as a whole. This number is typically sourced from surveys but there are ways to measure it on social through social messaging.

With Sprout, for example, you can DM customers for feedback via Twitter and Facebook to gauge their CSAT score, or their Net Promoter Score — that is, how likely they are to recommend your company to a friend. Then, aggregate these survey results into an automated Customer Feedback Report to synthesize your findings.

Comments

While this is also an engagement metric, what people are saying in the comments provides valuable information about them, and your brand. The comments section is a great place to uncover opportunities to improve the customer experience.

Awareness metrics

Awareness metrics, as the name suggests, are integral to connecting the dots between your social media strategy and the brand awareness it’s creating.

Here are a few awareness metrics to prioritize.

Impressions

At the post level, impressions are how many times a post is displayed to someone. Impressions are a good indicator of how popular a piece of content is, and that people may be viewing a post multiple times.

Not every channel has both reach and impressions. For example, TikTok’s “total video views” is the equivalent of impressions. Twitter and YouTube only offer impressions; not reach.

While impressions tell you a lot about the potential visibility your content has on social, it’s still important to look at other metrics for ultimate performance context. If you have multiple goals, like increasing awareness and educating your audience, you’ll likely want to look for a combination of impressions, engagement and conversion rate.

Reach

Reach is the potential unique viewers a post has—in other words, how many individuals have seen a post.

The difference between reach and impressions can be confusing at first. Think of it this way: If I see a post three times, that’s three impressions. But I only count as one person reached. But they’re both important to track, especially if your goals for social are focused around brand awareness and perception.

Video views

Video views may come off as a vanity metric. But on certain channels, like TikTok, views count as impressions, and are therefore important to monitor.

Views are also a good indicator of how much awareness you’re generating with a video. But this metric is most powerful when combined with other metrics, like view duration, engagement or shares, that provide wider context.

Metrics for customer retention

Customer retention and loyalty is slightly less straightforward to measure on social than, say, awareness or conversion metrics. There are ways to gather this information through your channels. Here are a few metrics that will help you measure customer retention and loyalty:

Net promotor score (NPS)

Your net promoter score is how likely customers are to recommend your brand to other people—a helpful indicator of customer loyalty and retention.

This is typically gathered through surveys, which usually ask customers how likely they are to refer your brand to someone on a scale of 0 to 10. Those who mark 9 or 10 are called “promotors,” and are excited about your brand. Anyone who marks 0-6 is called a “detractor,” and is unsatisfied.

Here’s how you calculate your score: % of promoters – % of detractors. If you use Sprout, you can set up NPS surveys in Facebook and Twitter DMs for consumers to fill out after interacting with your brand. Their answers will appear in your Customer Feedback Report.

Social commerce metrics

Using social commerce storefronts, like Facebook Shops and Instagram Shopping, provides you with a number of retention and loyalty metrics.

In Meta’s Commerce Manager Insights, metrics like returning visitors, returning buyers and sales from followers—while all estimated—help you understand social commerce customer retention.

Reviews

Tracking your reviews, like those gathered on Google, TripAdvisor and Facebook, is a solid way to gauge customer satisfaction and how likely they are to be loyal to your brand.

What’s more—responding to reviews, positive and negative, helps you reward and retain happy customers. And potentially win you back unhappy customers by resolving an issue and hearing them out.

Metrics for social media ROI

Social metrics that connect the dots between your social channels and larger business are crucial to proving your team’s ROI and impact. And mapping conversions, web visits and referral traffic back to your social channels is a powerful way to do so. Here are the metrics you want to pay attention to:

Conversion rate

Conversion rate measures how well your social ad or campaign is convincing people to take a desired action. Think: making a purchase, opting into your email newsletter, signing up for an event or a webinar, downloading a guide or visiting a webpage.

Calculate conversion rate like this: (total number of social media conversions / desired metric, like clicks, website visits or impressions) x 100. But analytics tools will calculate this for you.

If your conversion rate is low, try A/B testing your ad or campaign messaging, creative and CTA.

Conversions

On top of knowing your conversion rate, it’s also helpful to know how many conversions your ad, post, channel or campaign is receiving.

A conversion is when someone takes a desired action, like purchasing something from your site or signing up for an upcoming event. A social conversion means they visited via a social media channel and then purchased something in that same visit.

Social media referral traffic

Referrals are how a user lands on your website. In web analytics, you’ll see them broken down into sources. Social media referral traffic describes people who visit your website directly from social media pages and posts.

The best way to measure this is by using UTM tracking. UTM tracking involves adding a code to any URLs you share on social—think blog posts or product links. This enables you to see exactly how much traffic is coming to your site from specific social media channels, posts and ads in Google Analytics.

Use our UTM Builder to create your trackable links—“Social” is usually the source/medium you’ll be monitoring, and then it’s broken down by network.

Website traffic

While your social team may not currently be tracking website traffic, it’s an important metric to look at alongside your social media performance.

The ability to attribute an increase in website traffic to social media activity—from campaigns to new content formats or viral posts—is one of the best ways to illustrate the impact of social on the larger business.

Using a tool like Google Analytics—displayed here within a Sprout report—helps visualize web sessions day by day that are directly attributed to specific social channels.

Brand health metrics

What you learn on social carries implications—and possibilities—for your entire business. And social metrics that ladder up to brand health are some of the most powerful sources of social business intelligence.

Here are a few metrics that shed light on the health of your organization:

Audience sentiment

Knowing what people say in the comments section is one thing. But knowing how people feel about your brand and products sheds richer light on brand health.

Audience sentiment reveals how people actually feel about your brand and products. You can even compare the sentiment towards your brand to that of competitors.

Social listening is one of the most effective ways to turn social media chatter around your brand or specific topic into quantifiable sentiment, like in the Sprout example below.

Brand mentions

Brand mentions is a metric that involves tracking how many times your brand is mentioned in posts or comments on social—whether or not you’re tagged.

Organic social mentions—like @mentions that aren’t part of a reply, or tagging a brand in an Instagram story without prompting—indicate good brand awareness.

Your team is likely already tracking mentions for social monitoring. But to see the full impact of your brand mentions, you need to capture posts and comments that mention your brand name, and even misspell it, without tagging you. Notice how Brooklinen was able to jump into this conversation without being tagged:

Social listening also empowers you to identify common keywords mentioned alongside your brand. This makes it easier to better understand if those mentions signal feedback, a brand breakthrough or a brand crisis.

Share of Voice

Share of voice (SOV) shows you where your brand ranks in the market compared to competitors. This helps you better understand how much of the industry conversation your brand dominates.

Share of voice information is typically measured by analyzing real conversations happening through the social space. This helps you understand when customers recommend your brand, or when they pick other brands over yours.

Share of voice is calculated by dividing your brand metrics (or measures) by the total market metrics. The metric you choose to plug in will depend on your goals—but mentions on social will be most relevant for social teams.

This is tricky information to source manually, so an automation tool, like social listening, is helpful.

Social media engagement metrics

Engagement is a big umbrella category to track. It’s also one of the most important.

Engagement boils down to how much your audience interacts with your account or content, and how often. High engagement rates indicate a healthy and interested audience and highlights the content types that are most appealing to them.

But looking at a combination of metrics paints you a more complete picture. A post with 100,000 impressions looks good. But if it only received 50 engagements, it failed to build brand connection.

Or, a post may have 100,000 engagements. But if they’re all “angry” reacts, you need to investigate further.

Social media engagement metrics are great to benchmark—for your performance, and against competitors. For example, in 2023, the average daily engagements per post across all industries was 12. Download our 2024 Content Benchmarks report for more data.

Here are a few social media engagement metrics to look at.

Post engagement rate

Engagement rate is a metric often used to track how actively involved with your content your audience is and how effective your brand campaigns are. Engaged consumers interact with brands through interactions such as likes, comments and social sharing.

Likes, comments, retweets, reactions etc.

Actions you can take directly on a post, including likes, reactions or comments, are engagements on a granular level.

These individual engagement metrics are vanity metrics on their own, but they add up. And when examined at a high level, they tell you a lot about which of your posts are most successful and what your audience likes.

Shares are another granular metric. But if certain content pieces receive more shares than others, this is valuable information.

This shows you what content people are willing to share with their friends, increasing your brand awareness.

Video completion rate

While video views help you determine a video’s initial popularity, video completion rate tells you more about how interesting and engaging the content is.

For example, if a video gets 10,000 views, that’s promising. But if people drop off after a few seconds, your video fails to hold attention.

Paid social media metrics

When it comes to paid social, ensuring you’re getting the most bang for your buck is crucial.

But here are key metrics to pay attention to ensure you’re spending smarter, and optimizing ad campaigns:

Click-through rates (CTR)

Click-through rate (CTR) compares the number of times someone clicks on your content to the number of impressions you get (i.e., how many times the ad was viewed). A high CTR means an effective ad.

Note that CTRs differ wildly across industries, networks and content types. Some common examples of areas where CTR is measured include:

Email links and call-to-action buttons
PPC advertisements
Links on landing pages
Social media advertising
On-site elements (buttons, image, etc)

It’s best to research industry benchmarks beforehand and then monitor your ads and adjust accordingly.

Cost per click (CPC)

Cost per click is exactly what it sounds like: how much it costs for every click you receive on a paid piece of content. And cost per impression is measuring how much you have to pay per thousand impressions.

You often cap your spend at a specific cost per click—for example, Google recommends setting $1 as your maximum cost for Google ads. And Facebook ads, on average, are $0.94 CPC—cheaper than LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube advertising.

Here’s how you calculate CPC: advertising cost / number of clicks.

And here’s how you calculate your average CPC: total cost of clicks / total number of clicks.

Knowing your average will help you determine which ads to optimize for better engagement.

Web conversions

Web conversions are when a website visitor takes a desired action on your website, like purchasing an item, reading an article or signing up for a webinar.

Use Google Analytics to directly connect web conversions to visitors directed to your website, articles or a final purchase from social media.

Bonus tip: Many social media platforms enable in-app shopping. Be sure to track direct-from-social purchases to tie social media storefronts to business revenue.

Return on ad spend (ROAS)

ROAS tells you how much revenue your ad is making compared to how much spend you’re putting into a specific ad campaign.

In a way, ROAS is a more granular way to show the financial ROI of a specific ad campaign. This is a stellar way to justify further ad spend, or to determine which ads don’t have a high enough return.

Calculate ROAS like this: revenue gained from social ads / ad cost for the same ads or campaign. Illustrate the result of this calculation as a ratio. For example, if you earn $5 from every $1 spent on an ad, your ROAS is 5:1.

Social media measurement tips for painless reporting

Knowing what social media metrics to track is just the first step. The key is knowing how to make sense of them for your team and other stakeholders.

Social data is often much larger than social alone. And when you make social data a cross-org asset, you demonstrate the power of social, and the impact your team has on the business as a whole.

Here are some social media measurement tips to help your team and org be more data-driven.

Create shared definitions for your metrics

An easy-to-solve barrier when it comes to understanding social metrics is simply knowing what each metric means, and why it matters.

Creating a sharable glossary of terms that includes metric definitions, how they’re measured and why they matter keeps everyone on the same page.

This eases the process of educating new team hires, interns or close collaborators. And it helps outside stakeholders, including your C-suite, make sense of your reports and understand ROI.

Add meaning by telling a story with your metrics

Social metrics are just numbers—individual puzzle pieces.

The key to good reporting is by data storytelling to create the big picture. Data storytelling is adding meaning to your metrics by using them to demonstrate the impact of content on your social strategy, and of social on your whole business.

Here are a few things to consider when deciding on what story to tell:

Your audience: A peer might want granular data, like impressions and clicks. But an executive will likely want business-level takeaways, like ROI and sentiment.
The type of report: This will help you narrow down the metrics you use. Creating a monthly report? Highlight your most engaged-with and high-impressions posts, and what that means for your strategy. A campaign report? Highlight the impact your campaign had on a specific goal, like conversions or web traffic.
Your business goals: Touch on brand awareness by highlighting metrics like impressions, reach and views. Highlight ROI by showing website traffic upticks during a campaign, or conversion rate of ads.
Your team goals: Are you reporting to justify leaning into a new content type, like video? Or to secure a larger budget by proving the impact of ads?
Changes: Metrics have the most impact when you give them context. The change in conversions, for example, from the beginning of a campaign to the end illustrates ROI.

Download our social media reporting toolkit to get a jumpstart on your data storytelling.

Create a regular reporting cadence

Reporting is one of the most important ways to keep your team and strategy on track. Create a regular reporting cadence to stay agile. Think monthly reports for health checks, quick changes and experiments, and quarterly and yearly reports for larger shifts and progress towards business goals.

Take this a step further and break down silos by regularly sharing custom reports with other team leaders. Talk to other teams about how social data will help them. Then, regularly send a report containing the most useful metrics and takeaways.

Reporting often feels daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. Using analytics and reporting tools, like those offered in Sprout, streamlines and speeds up this process. My Reports in Sprout’s Premium Analytics makes it easy to create reports that focus on the metrics stakeholders need. You can customize reports to specific business units and roles, with the option to create views for key stakeholders from marketing leaders and customer care managers to your C-suite.

When your strategy shifts, revisit what you measure

The only constant on social media is change. And that goes for your strategy, as well.

From org shifts to changes in the social space, your social strategy must be able to adapt. Your KPIs should match your strategy and business goals. If business goals change, those KPIs will change with it. And that means refocusing your metrics accordingly.

When this happens, revisit the metrics you prioritize. Are those metrics still helping you understand your strategy and its impact on the business?

Tools for tracking social media metrics

Calculating each metric by hand is no longer realistic.

To stay agile, you need the right tools. Analytics tools automate social media measurement, so you can focus on uncovering the insights that matter most to you.

Here are a few stellar tools for tracking social media metrics. And download our social media analytics template to be reporting-ready.

Network-specific metrics tools

All of the main social media platform players offer built-in analytics. Some of the metrics they offer may vary, but they’re all effective tools for tracking social media metrics.

Here is a brief snapshot of what each social platform offers:

Insights in Meta Business Suite

Insights in the Meta Business Suite streamline your Facebook and Instagram analytics, organic and paid, into one hub. But you can also view analytics for each of Meta’s platforms individually.

Insights give you an at-a-glance look at how your Facebook and Instagram strategies are performing, to easily compare your page performance against competitors and uncover audience demographics.

Here are some insights you can glean at a post and profile level for Facebook and Instagram:

Performance of your business profiles through metrics like trends and reach.
The cross-spend of your ad account for both platforms (Separate from the Ads Manager, which provides a more in-depth analysis and ways to build your campaigns.)
Engagement metrics for organic and boosted content, such as likes and comments.
Demographic info for those who follow you on Instagram and Like your Page on Facebook to better understand your audience.

TikTok Analytics

TikTok Analytics offers an easy way to measure your page and short-form video performance, follower stats and LIVE content.

Metrics like video views and most active times help you get a better understanding of video engagement and your best times to post.

If you choose to advertise on TikTok, you have access to even more metrics and performance data, like tracking actions that website visitors take, and creating unique audiences.

Twitter Analytics

Twitter analytics offer three dashboards:

The Tweet Activity dashboard provides a top-level look at how your Tweets and Page are performing. This is the main dashboard you’ll want to look at for performance metrics.
The Followers dashboard where you can learn more about your audience demographics.
The Twitter Cards dashboard to measure how your Twitter Cards—which involve adding meta tags to your webpages—drive actions like app installs or clicks.

Pinterest Analytics

Pinterest Analytics offers individual Pin analytics, a profile overview, audience analytics and more. And if you advertise on the platform, you’ll see how your organic and paid social content performs side-by-side to track your efforts for both strategies.

In addition to performance metrics, the Pinterest Analytics hub links to the Pinterest Trends dashboard. These additional insights help you understand what topics, keywords and themes are trending to improve your content and reach.

LinkedIn Analytics

LinkedIn Analytics offer a deep look into how your Page is performing and how your professional network is growing.

Beyond analytics for your Page and content, like followers and engagement, LinkedIn also uniquely offers professional-focused insights: Employer Brand to understand Career Page engagement, and Employee Advocacy. Third-party LinkedIn analytics tools can provide even more insight into your overall performance.

Sprout Social

Relying on each platform’s individual analytics dashboards leads to a lot of back and forth for your team. Sprout provides all of your key metrics and performance analytics in a centralized location, streamlining your team’s workflow.

Quickly create presentation-ready reports for your social channels with Sprout’s powerful analytics and reporting tools. The post performance report, for example, quickly identifies your top posts across networks, so you can quickly adjust your strategy and serve your audience.

And with custom reports, share reports designed with your internal audience in mind to focus on specific channels, overall performance and even competitor comparison.

With Sprout, you’re empowered to break down silos and make your team and entire org more data-driven. Try Sprout free for 30 days to see how we make measuring social media metrics even more impactful. And if you’re interested in our social listening solution, reach out to us for a personalized demo.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is one of the best tools to use to prove ROI and connect the dots between your social channels and business goals.

You may already be using Google Analytics for your website in general. But we’ve already mentioned how Google Analytics illustrates the impact of social by connecting social activity and channels to web traffic.

Use Google Analytics in conjunction with other tools for tracking social media metrics to create a complete picture of your social performance and impact. Sprout even offers a Google Analytics report where you can see how your social media activity drove sessions on your website.

Tableau

Tableau is the “creme de la creme” of metrics dashboards. It offers dynamic analytics dashboards and data visualizations that make business intelligence more accessible and help orgs be more data-driven.

Tableau dashboards provide an at-a-glance look at your social metrics alongside key insights from across your business. This gives you a 360 look at your business-wide performance and KPIs.

Bringing your social performance into a Tableau dashboard breaks down silos by providing more data visibility across your team and org. And with Sprout’s Tableau integration, seamlessly connect your social data to a dynamic dashboard.

Hone in on the social media metrics that matter most

There are dozens of metrics to choose from. And it’s too easy to get overwhelmed.

But choosing the right social media metrics to track is a game changer. Not just for your immediate team, but for your whole business.

If you want to ensure you’re measuring social media metrics with the greatest impact, download our social media metrics map to connect the most impactful metrics to KPIs and business goals.

Connect metrics to goals with the social media metrics map

The post The social media metrics to track in 2024 (and why) appeared first on Sprout Social.

The journey of a data point: Turning numbers into social media intelligence

Jamia Kenan — Thu, 04 Apr 2024 13:00:22 +0000

Every company should strive to be driven by data. As organizations and technologies become more sophisticated, we’ve been able to tap into the kinds of insights that wouldn’t have even been imaginable 15 years ago. Those insights drive real business value, whether you’re proactively increasing customer retention, engagement or satisfaction, or creating new products or services that solve problems your customers didn’t even know they had. Social media analytics isn’t just about the numbers—it tells a story about your business and customers.

“When I think about data, I inevitably think about social media. That might be because I spend my days working with our clients’ executives to capture the voice of their customer, but I think it’s because social media intelligence is the next data frontier,” says Ryan Barretto, President of Sprout Social.

Social media data gives you actionable intelligence to drive your business forward. But how exactly does data turn into business intelligence? And do professionals from social practitioners to marketing leaders take advantage of social insights?

We spoke with several subject matter experts at Sprout, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Bowling Green State University (BGSU) and Madden Media, a destination marketing agency, to learn how a data point becomes social media intelligence.

What is social media intelligence?
Why is social media intelligence important?
Strategies for gathering and using social media intelligence
7 ways to turn social data into actionable intelligence
3 social media intelligence tools to connect the dots
Use social media smarter

What is social media intelligence?

Social media intelligence is the process of gathering and analyzing data from conversations on social networks to inform decision-making. Across the social landscape, there are trillions of data points that are essential parts of cumulative business intelligence.

Social media intelligence involves pulling these points together into something measurable, whether you’re looking at volume, sentiment, content or demographics. Once you add context behind the data, those insights can guide marketing efforts, sales strategy, product development and more.

There’s a good chance your competitors are already using social media business intelligence to their advantage. According to The 2023 State of Social Media Report, 85% of business leaders say that social data consistently informs or often informs their company’s business strategy. Over the next three years, 30% of business leaders expect that amount to increase significantly.

Why is social media intelligence important?

Collecting survey data from your customers, monitoring product reviews and conducting focus groups are extremely valuable. When you combine that feedback with social media intelligence, you get an even clearer picture of what your audience wants.

One post might not mean a lot, but the aggregation of every post on a topic that’s relevant to your business can be magical. Social data comes from a wider audience, it’s unfiltered and it gives you a real-time understanding of your market.

How to use LinkedIn hashtag analytics to boost content reach

Jasmine Williams — Thu, 28 Mar 2024 14:00:31 +0000

With over a billion members in 200+ countries and territories worldwide, LinkedIn is one of the most popular social networks for brands looking to reach a professional audience.

But with millions of posts flooding users’ feeds daily, how do you make sure your content gets noticed? Hashtags may be the answer. LinkedIn hashtags are searchable, which increases your content’s reach and gets your posts in front of more of the right people.

In this article, we’ll dive into why hashtags matter, how they boost your brand’s visibility and how to use LinkedIn hashtag analytics to add fuel to the fire of your LinkedIn marketing strategy.

Table of Contents

What are LinkedIn hashtag analytics?
Why tracking LinkedIn hashtag analytics is important for your business
How to generate LinkedIn hashtag analytics

What are LinkedIn hashtag analytics?

LinkedIn hashtag analytics reveal how popular specific hashtags are on the platform and how they impact content performance.

For example, hashtag analytics offer insight into how many people see your posts because of the hashtags you use, which hashtags get the most traction and how much engagement your posts get because of those hashtags. Understanding the data behind your hashtag strategy will help you fine-tune your approach and content to reach more of your target audience.

Why tracking LinkedIn hashtag analytics is important

On LinkedIn, 40% of users organically interact with a page weekly, making it an excellent choice for brands that want to get noticed without paid promotion. Adding LinkedIn hashtags to your organic content can help it reach an even broader audience, but you need to be strategic to make the most of them. This is where LinkedIn hashtag analytics come into play.

Here are the top reasons why you should keep track of LinkedIn hashtag analytics.

Identify the best hashtags for your brand

Have you noticed that a particular hashtag has a high follower count and consistently drives engagement on your company’s posts? Those are good signs that you should keep using it. Analyzing these metrics over time will allow you to pinpoint the exact keywords and phrases that resonate the most with your audience.

Understand which hashtags compliment your brand

Prioritize relevancy over popularity to reach the people most interested in what you’re sharing. For example, suppose you’re a social media marketer at a B2B marketing software company for small businesses. You might opt for the more specific #smallbusiness hashtag, with around 800,000 followers, over the general #marketing, with over 20 million followers. Despite its smaller follower count, picking the more relevant hashtag will help you cut through the noise and speak directly to your ideal customers.

Subscription design service Superside recently used this approach for a LinkedIn post promoting an upcoming webinar, using very niche hashtags like #aitutorial and #3dmoviestylecharacter with a broader but still targeted hashtag #characterdesign, which has over 14,000 followers.

Track the sentiment for certain hashtags

A solid social media strategy also tracks how people feel about the content you’re putting out. Monitor what hashtags drive more positive or negative engagement to ensure your content hits the right notes.

For example, creating a Listening Topic in Sprout Social will enable you to analyze the topic’s most common keywords and hashtags and see a breakdown by sentiment for related keywords and hashtags.

Monitor your competitors

Incorporating hashtag analysis into your competitive monitoring will help you optimize your social media strategy by staying competitive and increasing your share of voice more relevantly. For example, if competitor posts with specific hashtags consistently get high engagement, that’s an indicator that those hashtags are hitting the mark with their audience, and you may want to start incorporating those or similar keywords into your content.

Sprout’s Listening solutions make this process easy. They enable you to gather key metrics like volume, engagement, likes and impression breakdowns for specific competitor hashtags, or a broader overview of your competitors’ top hashtags.

How to generate LinkedIn hashtag analytics

Not all social media analytics are created equal. Knowing how to generate this data will make all the difference in maximizing your post reach and engagement. From leveraging built-in LinkedIn tools to browser extensions to third-party social media management platforms, here are the primary methods for generating LinkedIn hashtag analytics.

Use the native LinkedIn hashtag analytics

LinkedIn offers follower count numbers for all hashtags. To see how many followers a hashtag has, use this URL formula:

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/hashtag/keyword

For example, if you wanted to see the follower count for #socialmediamarketing, you would enter the following URL into your web browser:

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/hashtag/socialmediamarketing

The follower count will be displayed prominently at the top of the page. It’s not the most efficient system, but this method will show you the popularity of specific hashtags. From there, make a shortlist of industry-specific hashtags and test them to see how they affect performance.

Use a LinkedIn hashtags analytics extension

Hashtag Analytics is a free Google Chrome extension by Engage AI. The tool allows you to check hashtag follower counts directly on LinkedIn, get real-time insights while scrolling through your feed and get hashtag suggestions as you write your posts.

It also offers additional data like hashtag follower growth over time, the maximum number of likes and comments based on the top 20 recent posts and the total reach of a post after incorporating hashtags.

To start exploring hashtags, add the extension to Chrome, log into LinkedIn, and access the tool icon in your browser.

Use a third-party social media scheduling tool

Creating a tag for different hashtags in Sprout Social will enable you to track how each one performs in engagement, reach and clicks across your posts. Say, for instance, you work for a virtual event software company and want to compare posts with #eventprofs to ones with #eventtech.

Creating a tag for each hashtag will enable you to generate Tag Performance Reports that provide metrics like impressions, engagements, engagement rate (per impression) and top posts. This data will help refine your social media strategy and drive more meaningful interactions with your target audience.

Harnessing the power of LinkedIn analytics

It’s challenging for brands to stand out in the ‘pay to play’ social media landscape. Fortunately, hashtags are an easy way to boost your content and organically get it to the right people. Just make sure you monitor your hashtag analytics to see which hashtags drive the most results to maximize your LinkedIn content efforts.

Of course, hashtags are just one feature that can affect content performance. If you want to dive even deeper into the world of LinkedIn performance data and learn more about the best platforms to track metrics, check out our roundup of the top LinkedIn analytics tools on the market.

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