The Social Metrics Map

How to Tie Social Media to Business Goals

 Introduction
Uri Bar-Joseph, Sr. Director of
Marketing at Simply Measured
The Social Metrics Map - How to Tie Social Media to Business Goals
In 2009, I found an internship with a small
Seattle startup. It was my first marketing
job. Over the next three months, I worked
my butt off. I showed up early, worked extra
hours, did everything they told me to. I was
really hoping to get that full-time job at the
end of my internship.
After three months, one of the founders
came to me and said Wed like to talk to
you about your future with the company. I
was really excited. I was pretty sure he was
going to tell me We want to offer you a
full time job and you can start on Monday.
He didnt.
Instead, he told me that I was not meeting
his expectations. Since they liked me, they
wanted to extend my internship by three
months so I had an opportunity to turn it
around. I was devastated.
I went home that weekend and started by
blaming everyone else. How could they not
see how hard Ive worked? How could they
not recognize how much effort Ive put into
this internship? How do they not understand
the value I bring to this company?
After some time I realized that what I was
really upset about was why my expectations
were so far off base. So I did a lot of thinking
that weekend, and realized that it was my
fault, for one specific reason:
My definition of success was not
shared by the people around me.
I just expected them to evaluate my success
the same way I do, without discussing this
with them, or looking ahead. I was hoping
that at the end we could all say He did well.
1
 Over the years in marketing, Ive realized
that success needs to be defined up front,
Well talk about:
not at the end. If you leave it to someone
else, or if you leave it undefined, youll be
1. Identify Objectives:
disappointed...maybe even fired. Why its important to identify objectives,
and how to do it
In this guide, Id like to walk you through a
very simple 3-step plan to allow you to make
your expectations a reality and avoid the
2. Organize Social Metrics:
mistake I made. How to take all the metrics out there and
organize them into simple groups that
help prove success

3. Set Goals:
Setting realistic goals with the
appropriate objective and metrics

The Social Metrics Map - How to Tie Social Media to Business Goals 2
 AWARENESS

CONSIDERATION
1. Identify Objectives:
This is the marketing funnel. Many marketers Companies create functions, programs, and
use the buyers journey as a framework, which campaigns that allow their marketing team to
DECISION is similar. The funnel is a linear representation move the buyer between those stages. So we
of the buyers journey, designed to align align each stage with an objective.
marketing and sales activities.
The objectives are very similar, but they
These are the stages that a buyer goes include an action. For example, the action in
ADOPTION through when trying to make a decision the awareness stage is create awareness.
about a product or a service, and even after
they purchase.

ADVOCACY

The Social Metrics Map - How to Tie Social Media to Business Goals 3
4
 Create Awareness AWARENESS

Generate Demand CONSIDERATION

Marketing Objectives
Drive Conversion DECISION This is important because it leads to the next step,
which is identifying which social strategy will allow you
to achieve that objective. Weve outlined that here.

What TrustRadius found in a survey last summer is that

Delight Customers ADOPTION
50% of them can easily identify these, but they still find
it challenging to connect the dots.

Inspire Evangelism ADVOCACY

The Social Metrics Map - How to Tie Social Media to Business Goals 4
 AWARENESS
43%

CONSIDERATION 25%
What Marketing Objective
Do You Support?
DECISION 12%
When we asked which stage social media
supports, 43% said they support brand
awareness. Only 6% are focused on adoption.

ADOPTION 6%

ADVOCACY 11%

The Social Metrics Map - How to Tie Social Media to Business Goals 5
 AWARENESS Expose target audience
to brand content

CONSIDERATION Generate engagement

with brand content

Do You Have The

Drive target audience
DECISION to brand offers
Right Strategy?
Identifying the marketing objective you need
to support will allow you to come up with the
Drive customer right strategy for execution.
ADOPTION engagement with brand
product/services

Activate customer
ADVOCACY influencers

The Social Metrics Map - How to Tie Social Media to Business Goals 6
 ACTIVITY SUCCESS
Posts & Impressions &
Promotion Engagement
2. Organize Social Metrics
While a lot of marketers are capable of identifying
the correct objective and putting together the
appropriate strategy, a lot of them fail in this stage.
We asked why, and the answer is that there
are so many metrics out there. There is a lot of
confusion about what is important, which metrics
matter where, and what I should look at. On top
of that, metrics with the same name have different
definitions depending on the network youre
analyzing. Its exhausting!
The Social Metrics Map - How to Tie Social Media to Business Goals
IMPACT Less than 50% of marketers have
identified the correct metric to
evaluate their success.
Traffic &
Conversions
Each year Forrester Research gives The Groundswell Marketers are using the metrics that are easy,
Award to social media programs that apply, and all instead of using the right ones. So lets organize
Forrester asks is that in that application, they share this mess.
metrics that prove their success.
We identified three main types of metrics that will
In 2015, 84 companies applied, and among them, allow us to take this mess and put them in the right
there were 57 different success metrics. There is no buckets.
way that each of these 57 metrics are relevant.
What we see from this is that the social media
market has a metrics overload.
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Heres an example: Stage: Brand awareness

Marketing Objective: Create awareness

I chose brand awareness since its the most popular stage among marketers.
The corresponding strategy would be to expose the target audience to our
content and message. In order to do that, we need to go out there and
post and promote on social. This means that the activity metrics would be
posts and promotions.
Once we do that, theres a result of that activity. We capture that with the
success metrics, which are impressions and reach. Finally, the impact on the
business is Share of Voice (SOV) and Top of Mind Awareness (ToMA).
Social Media Strategy: Expose audience to brands content
Activity Metrics: Posts and promotions
Success Metrics: Impressions and reach
Impact on Business: SOV and ToMA
Its that simple. We took these 57 metrics, and we narrowed them down
to two success metrics. If your objective is to create brand awareness, in
order to prove success you need to measure impressions and reach, and to
connect it to the business, you need to focus on SOV and ToMA.

The Social Metrics Map - How to Tie Social Media to Business Goals 8
 Social Metrics Map
Social Metrics Map
SOCIAL MEDIA
BUYERS JOURNEY OBJECTIVE SOCIAL ACTIVITY SOCIAL KPIS BUSINESS IMPACT
STRATEGY

Create Expose target audience Posts, promotions

AWARENESS Impressions, reach SOV, Top of Mind Awareness
awareness to brand content (boosts)

Generate engagement
Generate of target audience with # of engagements,
CONSIDERATION Posts, responses Visitors/traffic (online or offline)
demand brand content types of engagements

Drive Drive target audience Conversions (purchases, lead sub-

DECISION conversion to brand offers Posts, promotions Link clicks missions, app downloads)

Drive engagement with (positive) earned mentions,

Delight Responses (i.e. social
ADOPTION customer care metrics Sentiment and satisfaction
customers brand product/services customer care)
(responses times & qty)

Inspire Activate customer Posts, outreach to Earned impressions, Referrals, influencer activity,
ADVOCACY evangelism influencers influencers, reshares earned reach, social UGC positive word of mouth, NPS

We created this process for each stage of the marketing funnel, This will allow you to tie the way you prove your value with the
and mapped each stage of theAbuyers
BUYER'S JOURNEY STAGE
journey with the objective, buyers journey and your overall business objective.
person relative position to a buying decision
strategy, and different metrics you need.
MARKETING OBJECTIVE The brands desired outcome from a marketing activity
SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY The brands plan of action to achieve the marketing objective
The Social Metrics Map - How to Tie Social Media to Business Goals 9
SOCIAL ACTIVITY The social actions the brand must take to execute strategy
SOCIAL KPIS The results of the social actions taken
3. Set Realistic Goals Establish a Point of Reference
Setting goals with no information is a gamble. We dont have to gamble as 1.
social marketers, because we have an abundance of information.
Setting realistic goals is about a reference point. A goal is taking one of 2.
the metrics weve discussed, and attaching a value. So if impressions is
the metric Im focused on, the goal would be a certain number (a value) of 3.
impressions, during a specific time frame, with a specific audience, etc.
4.
The first step is to set a reference point. To the right youll find five ways to
do this, ranked from most effective to least.
5.
The Social Metrics Map - How to Tie Social Media to Business Goals
Your own baseline: If you did it before, use your own baseline to set
realistic goals
Peers: What kind of success have like-minded companies seen?
Competitors: What type of results have your competitors seen?
Industry Benchmarks: These can be difficult to navigate because
theyre generic, and not always relevant
Common sense (guesstimation): If you have a good idea of what your
goal should be, this is better than nothing
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 Conclusion

If you dont define what success means for

your social team, who will?

This process of mapping metrics to the buyers journey is the key to taking
control of social media goals.

Start by using the funnel to identify your objective, take all the metrics
you have access to and narrow them down to two, and finally set goals by
identifying good reference points.

The Social Metrics Map - How to Tie Social Media to Business Goals 11
About Simply Measured
Simply Measured is the most complete social analytics solution,
empowering marketers with unmatched access to their social
data to more clearly define their social strategy and to optimize
their tactics for maximum impact.
Our goal is to put the tools to understand business data in the
hands of business users. We think reporting should be simple,
attractive, and accessible for everyone not just data scientists.
Our software streamlines the process from data to deliverables
and eliminates the countless hours spent on everyday reporting
tasks. We do this by putting cloud data sources at your fingertips,
providing a marketplace of best practice reports, and allowing
you to generate beautiful solutions on the web, in Excel, and in
PowerPoint with a couple of clicks.

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