The 7 Social Insights That Will Help Your Brand Win Today And Thrive In The Future (Part 2 of 2)

(Read Part 1: Why You Need Better Social Analytics)

In part 1, we discussed why businesses need better social analytics. Search marketing was transformed a decade ago by Google Analytics because it gave companies better insights to prove and improve the value of their investment in search ads. Now, businesses need the same for social.

Here are the seven social insights that every business needs:

1. Conversions Per Share

This is the single most must-have metric every business that is seriously investing in social needs to be measuring. Google Analytics brought conversion metrics to web analytics; conversion metrics need to be brought to social, and this is it.

Social media boils down to sharing (posting, tweeting, pinning, etc.). Sharing happens in a variety of ways: consumer-to-consumer, consumer-brand, one-to-one, one-to-many, re-sharing, etc., and ultimately this is what social is about. All the other actions on social media just complement it. People can ‘like’ on Facebook or ‘favorite’ on Twitter, but it all happens to some type of share. On social media, the key actionable unit–the atomic unit–is the share.

Because it’s the atomic unit, social’s conversion metric needs to use sharing as the denominator. Conversions Per Share gives true insight into your social efficiency, and every other key social insight is grounded on it.

Additionally, it’s important to note that, like traditional media marketing, social media marketing comprises three elements: 1) Earned: what your fans share about you, 2) Owned: your non-paid posting, and 3) Paid: your social ads. Therefore, every brand really has three conversion metrics: Earned Conversions Per Share, Owned Conversions Per Share, and Paid Conversions Per Share.

2. Revenue Per Share

Similar to Conversions Per Share, Revenue Per Share is integral now that social, especially Facebook, is a pay-to-play channel. Every ecommerce brand that’s investing in social (and they should be) needs to be tracking how social impacts revenue. With the targeting capabilities of the big social channels, social can and should absolutely be driving revenue for your company. And if you’re tracking Revenue Per Share, you can optimize your ad buy to target the most likely people to buy with the content (products) that they’re most likely to purchase on the social channel that they’re most likely to convert from.

One of the most used social strategies is to leverage key influencers, and the biggest names on social command huge amounts of money to post for brands. By tracking Revenue Per Share for the influencers’ posts, you can truly measure the ROI of your social influencer investment.

3. Most Social Content

While there’s often a positive correlation, your most popular content in general isn’t necessarily your most social content. Your Most Social Content is the content that has the most number of conversions from social. If you’re not tracking how your content is performing (again, preferably based on conversions), you will be wasting a lot of time, effort, and money on sharing sub-optimal content.

Google Analytics conversion-tracking, or similar web-based conversion-tracking, will partially capture this insight. Because GA uses last-click attribution, you will be able to see what conversions were referred directly from a social channel.

4. Most Social Influencers

Leveraging social influencers is a pretty common social marketing strategy. Services like Klout that identify people who have huge audiences within particular interest categories. But it’s also important for brand’s to identify their own natural influencers, who are typically smaller-scale. While they may not have millions or even hundreds of thousands of followers, they have high social efficiency. That is, they have a high Conversions Per Share ratio–when they share, their audience acts. Alone, they might not significantly move the needle, but when these high efficiency social influencers are aggregated, they can be extremely powerful. Combined with the power of large-scale influencers, brands are able to do the most effective social influencer marketing.

5. Most Social Converters

The flipside of Most Social Influencers is Most Social Converters: the people who are responding best to social sharing. With how sophisticated targeting is for social ads, especially Facebook, it’s important to know not only who your influencers are, but also who is converting on social. People who respond well to their friends’ recommendations on social have a higher likelihood of converting from social ads, as well. Therefore, if you know who converts at a high conversion/share rate organically, you can more efficiently target your paid social ads.

6. Fastest Channel to Convert

Because every brand has different customers and different customer behaviors, brands need to figure out the efficiency of their social channels. The Fastest Channel to Convert insight helps brands do just that. For example, if the average time to convert on Facebook is two weeks, while Twitter and Pinterest are 2 hours, Facebook is a top-of-the-funnel channel, while Twitter and Pinterest are a lot lower. This insight helps brands more effectively prioritize and distribute their social advertising budget social in accordance with their customer behavior.

7. Social Average Order Value

For most retailers, average order value is a staple KPI. As companies increase their investment in social, it’s critical for marketers to be able to compare AOV across channels, including social. More specifically, the ability to compare their digital banner AOV to their Pinterest AOV to their Facebook AOV. And even more granularly, organic Facebook AOV versus paid Facebook AOV, etc. With these specific social AOV insights, marketers can do things like refine their paid social targeting strategies. They also help marketers more effectively allocate their social budget to the channels that are most effective.

The social analytics space beyond likes, follows, RTs, and comments can be daunting. With these seven social insights, you’ll be able to have a clear business perspective of where your social efforts stand. You’ll be able to prove that they are driving business as well as improve. Don’t be satisfied with surface-level engagement metrics. With these seven next-generation social insights, you’ll be able to win today and thrive in the future.

The 7 Social Insights That Will Help Your Brand Win Today And Thrive In The Future (Part 2 of 2)