- Different stakeholders within a company require different types and volumes of social media metrics based on their roles and responsibilities. Community managers need granular digital metrics frequently, while executives require financial metrics quarterly. - Standardized reporting templates tailored to each stakeholder group should focus on the perspective most relevant to their objectives. Community managers see digital and health metrics, while marketers review branding and trial data and executives evaluate financial impact. - Interactive marketers must become the central hub for all social media metrics and distribute them appropriately according to standardized frequencies and volumes, helping stakeholders integrate social data into their work while focusing on the most important metrics.

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For Interactive Marketing Professionals
Executive Summary
Social media contributes value to interactive marketing programs in many ways — but measuring
that value is difficult. The sheer volume of social media metrics can quickly become overwhelming
and distracting for key stakeholders. To keep your team focused, you must become the hub of
your company’s social media marketing reporting and create standardized reporting templates and
frequencies for different types of stakeholders: frequent reporting of digital metrics to community
managers and social media strategists, per-campaign or annual reporting of branding and trial metrics
to other marketing team members, and quarterly or annual reporting of financial metrics to executives.
Different roles need access to different types of social media metrics
Social media marketing programs create an enormous volume of data: We’ve seen literally hundreds of
metrics tracked by the marketers, agencies, vendors, and sites that use social media.1
In many cases these
metrics are collected, evaluated, and distributed indiscriminately throughout organizations. However,
not every metric actually matters to your business — and while your organization as a whole needs to
track and understand all the different benefits of a social media program, not every individual member
of your organization needs to focus on the same type of social media insight.
We’ve identified three groups of stakeholders who regularly demand insight into the performance
of social media marketing programs: 1) the social media strategists and community managers who
implement social programs on a day-to-day basis; 2) the marketing managers and executives who need
to know whether social programs create marketing value for the organization; and 3) the business-unit
heads and C-level executives who must make decisions on social programs’ impact on the company’s
bottom line (see Figure 1). Each of these groups should primarily focus on different:
· Types of social media marketing metrics. The primary job function of each of these groups varies
dramatically, and so should the social media metrics on which they focus. In our report “The ROI
Of Social Media Marketing,” we introduced four key perspectives from which to view your social
media programs: the digital perspective, the brand perspective, the financial perspective, and the
risk management perspective.2
Each set of stakeholders must focus primarily on the perspective that
helps them fulfill their own job objectives and responsibilities.
February 22, 2011
Social Media Marketing Metrics That Matter
Communicating The Right Data To Different Internal Stakeholders
by Nate Elliott
with Emily Riley, Sarah Glass, and James McDavid

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2Social Media Marketing Metrics That Matter
For Interactive Marketing Professionals
· Volumes and frequencies of social media marketing metrics. The staff who work on social
media every day need immediate and granular data to see how to fix any problems or exploit
any opportunities that arise — so they require a high volume of data at a high frequency.
Conversely, top company executives may only closely study a handful of key social media
financial metrics at budgeting time each year; this requires a much lower volume and frequency
of reporting.
Figure 1 Different Stakeholders Require Different Types Of Social Media Reporting
Give Social-Specific Staff The Metrics To Build Healthy Social Media Marketing Programs
Social media strategists and community managers have tactical responsibility for social media:
They’re the people using these tools and interacting with fans and followers on a daily basis, and the
ones who must build the strong platform on which a company’s social media success must be based.
To help social staff track their progress in these objectives — and ultimately succeed — interactive
marketing managers must provide these employees:
· Metrics primarily focused on the digital perspective. It’s up to social strategists and
community managers to build a strong social media opportunity (as measured by how many
fans and followers, community members, or readers and viewers they can reach) and sufficient
social media health (as measured by how much these fans participate with and talk about
the brand online). While these metrics can’t tell a company if its social media programs were
successful overall, without a social opportunity and social health a company will certainly fail.
Source: Forrester Research, Inc.58444
Role
Frequency
Metrics
Social strategists and
community managers
Interactive marketers and
marketing executives C-level executives
Hourly or daily Per campaign or annually Quarterly or annually
Tools
Listening platforms and web
analytics vendors Surveys
CRM tools, attribution tools,
and surveys
Social opportunity
• Fans, friends, and followers
• Members
• Visitors and readers
Perspective Digital Brand Financial
Social health
• Posts and comments
• Sentiment
Branding
• Awareness
• Brand attributes
• Purchase intent
Product trial
• Lead generation
• Coupon redemption
• Sampling
Sales
• Conversions
• Revenues
• Lifetime values

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3Social Media Marketing Metrics That Matter
For Interactive Marketing Professionals
· A high volume and frequency of metrics. Because these employees live and breathe social
media — and because social media moves fast and never sleeps — these employees require the
highest frequency and volume of social media metrics of any stakeholder group. To meet this
need, Dell has constructed a social media control center that tracks hundreds of metrics from
all over the world 24 hours a day — giving their community managers the ability to respond to
both threats and opportunities in real time.
· The tools they need to track those metrics. Most of the data that social media strategists and
community managers need can be collected by observation. Listening platforms can track
key digital metrics on public social media sites like Twitter and YouTube, while web analytics
vendors play a crucial role in tracking digital metrics in owned social media properties like
corporate blogs and company-hosted forums.3
Help Your Marketing Peers Turn Social Opportunity Into Branding And Trial
Marketing staff — from marketing managers all the way up through VPs of marketing — have both
tactical and strategic responsibilities for social media. They need the insight to see which tactics
can help them build brand impact and drive sampling and other forms of trial, as well as data that
guides them as they weave social media into their teams’ larger marketing strategies. To help the rest
of your marketing team succeed on both counts, offer them:
· Data primarily focused on the brand perspective. Brand metrics are nothing new for most
experienced marketers: We’ve talked about brand awareness, ad recall, brand attributes, and
intent to purchase for years. However, just 18% of US social media marketers say they use
brand surveys to measure the impact of their programs. These metrics — along with the more-
commonly tracked lead generation, sampling, and coupon redemption metrics — are vital to
understanding if social media has helped your team achieve its marketing objectives.
· A medium volume and a low frequency of reporting. Marketing teams don’t need access
to nearly the same frequency of data as social staff — and can’t generate this type of data that
frequently in any case. Lead and sample data is often reported on a monthly basis, while brand
metrics can be tracked on a once-per-campaign basis as P&G did for its Secret brand’s “Let
Her Jump” social media marketing program. Likewise, marketers need not track hundreds of
interaction metrics but just the handful of key brand and trial metrics that match their goals.
· Survey tools to collect brand impact data. Online branding surveys aren’t much fun to run —
the prevalent control versus exposed methodology isn’t necessarily ideal, and finding ways to run
survey invitations on social networks can be difficult — but there’s simply no other reliable way to
collect information on how your audience’s opinions are changing. Marketers should either attach
campaign-specific surveys to their key social programs or add questions to their annual brand
surveys that let them identify customers who engaged with their social media efforts.

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4Social Media Marketing Metrics That Matter
For Interactive Marketing Professionals
Help High-Level Executives Focus On Social Media’s Bottom-Line Impact
Business-unit heads (such as product managers and sales leaders) and C-level executives (including
CMOs) should view social media on a strategic rather than a tactical level. While many executives —
especially those most excited by the potential of the channel — will be tempted to get involved in the
day-to-day metrics of your social programs, it’s most important that interactive marketers give these
executives access to the data that will help them secure budget for future social media programs and
integrate social initiatives into the company’s overall strategies and operations. To accomplish this,
interactive marketers must deliver these executives:
· Metrics primarily focused on the financial perspective. These metrics cover both the positive
economic impact of social media marketing programs (such as incremental sales) as well
as how social media helps companies avoid expenses (including cost of marketing and risk
management benefits). For instance, when Audi’s marketing team needed to prove the value
of its “Next Big Social Thing” program to executives, it reported the number of pre-orders the
program delivered.4
With this data in hand, executive sponsors of social media programs will be
able to defend social programs and build social media into the organization’s regular budget.
· A medium volume of reporting at a low frequency. The volume and frequency of data
required by your executives are no lower than those required by your marketing team — only
the nature of the data changes. Be prepared to report financial data to your executives quarterly,
with a special focus on annual reporting to assist in budgeting.
· CRM and attribution tools that can collect this data. Simple sales tracking can create this data —
especially if you sell online or use advanced CRM to track online leads into offline sales —
but many companies will also need to survey their buyers to find out if social played a role in
the purchase cycle. Attribution vendors may also help you create this type of data, though their
capabilities in measuring social media marketing remain immature.
R ecomme n datio n s
use education and standardized reporting to improve your team’s focus
To help internal stakeholders focus on what really matters, interactive marketers who lead social
media marketing programs must:
· Become the home of all social media marketing metrics. As a marketer, you should
primarily focus on the brand perspective to gauge if you’ve succeeded in your use of social
media. But as the head of your company’s social media programs, you’ll also be the person
the rest of the organization turns to for the social metrics they must focus on. Put the tools
in place to measure all four perspectives of social media, and be prepared to distribute those
metrics correctly throughout your organization — while keeping sight of which metrics
matter most to your role.

5. 5Social Media Marketing Metrics That Matter
For Interactive Marketing Professionals
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· Help your stakeholders integrate social media data into their other data sources. Start
by asking your marketing peers and executives which metrics they’re generating from other
channels — and then look for the social media marketing metrics that match. In most cases
the answers will look like the map we’ve drawn above; but even if they don’t, the exercise will
help you and your stakeholders focus on the handful of metrics that matter most.
· Standardize different reports for different audiences. Now that you know who needs
what metrics and how often, create standard report templates and frequencies to reflect
these needs. For instance, UK agency We Are Social used to provide a regular dossier,
dozens of pages long, to its clients. When it realized the marketing managers who received
these reports didn’t need that depth of data, it started offering four-page reports instead.
Remember that the report template for each stakeholder group may vary from project to
project, depending on each project’s objective. And where possible, automate this reporting
into stakeholders’existing dashboards.
· Show each group how its success fits into the bigger social media picture. Yes, you must
improve your stakeholders’focus when tracking social media programs. But your job isn’t to
put metrics into absolute silos, it’s to make sure stakeholders focus on the metrics that can
help them contribute to overall business success. So don’t hide broader metrics from the
people in your organization — in fact, show them the big picture on a regular basis. Just
make sure they spend most of their energy focusing on the numbers that can help them
contribute to that picture.
Endnotes
1
There are so many metrics you could measure that we separated them out into six categories: user reach,
user impact, volume of participation, quality of participation, volume of energy, and quality of energy. See
the October 29, 2009, “Three Steps To Measuring Social Media Marketing” report.
2
These four perspectives, combined, form what we call a “Balanced Social Media Marketing Scorecard.” See
the July 16, 2010, “The ROI Of Social Media Marketing” report.
3
If you need to choose a listening platform or an analytics vendor, our Wave reports can help. See the July 12,
2010, “The Forrester Wave™: Listening Platforms, Q3 2010” report, and see the July 23, 2009, “The Forrester
Wave™: Web Analytics, Q3 2009” report.
4
The chairman of Audi is focused on the right metrics; he proudly reports that this social media program
contributed to “the largest number of pre-orders in the history of Audi.” Source: Audi, “Audi A1 — The
Next Big Social Thing,” Forrester Groundswell Awards (http://groundswelldiscussion.com/groundswell/
awards2010/detail.php?id=417).