An often neglected way of measuring the success of your social media marketing efforts is looking at the contributions of each team member.
Undoubtedly, your team works hard to drive ROI across all of your social channels; therefore, it is important to identify who’s contributing what, where there are missed opportunities and how to better optimize each team member’s contributions to the overall cause through reporting.
The need to assess efforts at the micro level becomes even more imperative when you consider the impact social has on sales. In fact, according to Internet Retailer, social media influences purchasing behavior even more than retail websites do. Below is the breakdown of impact score by channel, according to the report:
- Retailers’ social network posts and pages: 35%
- Price comparison sites: 35%
- Shopping apps: 34%
- Brands’ social network posts and pages: 33%
- Product reviews: 33%
- Printable coupons: 32%
When it comes to this important function, then, you’ll want to take the following tips into account to ensure your organization is positioned for long-term success.
Choose the Right Team-Focused Goals
To truly understand if your social team’s efforts are paying off, it’s critical to establish what goals your organization is looking to accomplish on each channel. Goals give your social media strategy a focus and help identify what isn’t working to ensure you’re able to quickly adjust your campaigns to account for any missteps.
Setting team-focused goals can both measure the performance of an individual’s contributions and populate data on how well overall campaigns are performing.
Potential Social Media Goals
Goals Worth Considering for Monitoring The Success of Your Social Team Include
Strong Team Participation
Gain an understanding of what each team member is contributing to your overall social media management process.
Increased Efficiency
Develop an overview of which team activities, such as social monitoring or measurement, take the most and least amount of time as well as how each of these features impacts overall results. This will better inform challenges faced by the team while identifying the potential need to hire more talent.
Improved Customer Service
Understand the time it takes for each team member to address customer service requests, then use those insights to improve your team’s response protocols.
Proper Resource Allocation
To better allocate your resources, you need to understand where your team spends the most time and effort on social.
Proven Impact on ROI
Above all, monitor your team’s contributions to increasing sales, visibility, customer retention and engagement. This will quantify the importance of having a strong social team and enable your organization to optimize the most effective channels.
Pair Metrics to Each Goal
Once you have a clear vision of your larger objectives, match each of your team’s goals with specific, decision-based metrics.
Pure-vanity assessments, such as the amount of followers or Likes on a particular Facebook post, are less meaningful than metrics that illustrate the depth of a customer’s engagement, such as the amount of comments or shares received or the number of customer service requests answered in a given time frame.
Applying Insights Accordingly
The measurement of your social team’s efforts will provide insights into how your organization can continue to grow and improve, as you sift through your data to create an action plan for your entire organization. Here are a few ways team data can be used to impact growth:
Identify team members who aren’t engaged with their job, due to a low task-completion rate; then either better train them, transition them to another role or, if this issue isn’t resolved, let them go.
Understand where the team’s time is spent, then allocate resources to the areas that are the most critical.
Learn more about customer service requests in terms of how they are both received and resolved through social as compared to email, live chat and phone.
Pull Your Own Team Reports
Gaining insights to inform your broader social media strategy is much more manageable with the right tools to help. Below is an example of how to measure and report on team performance, using Sprout Social. In addition to analytics around publishing and task management, this tool will alert you of the speed and rate at which your team is responding to messages. As a result, your organization will be able to increase its efficiency while ensuring your brand is making the right connection with your most valued customers.
