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Hey!

Welcome to Social Files—your no-BS guide to generating demand for your B2B product using social & content.

Hope you had a great weekend. I spent a good amount of it roadmapping the plan for Social Files going into 2024. Lots of cool stuff coming.

Today I want to walk you through my workflow and templates for social media reporting. I’ll leave no stone unturned.

Let’s get into it.

🔎 DEEP DIVE

The Ultimate Guide to Social Media Reporting for B2B Marketers

How to prove ROI, get executive buy-in, and maybe even get a promotion

I get the same question every time I get on a sales call with a founder or B2B marketing exec.

How do I know if this stuff is working?

Content marketing, especially organic social, can be a black box in B2B. There’s also a stigma around follower growth, impressions, engagement rate, etc. as ‘vanity metrics.’ Does this stuff even lead to pipeline?

So today I want to accomplish 2 things:

• If you are a founder or executive, I want to show you how organic social leads to product demand and revenue.

• If you are a marketer, I want to show you how to use reporting to convince your C-Suite that organic social leads to product demand and revenue (so you can get more budget and a promotion).

The 2 types of metrics that matter in B2B organic social.

I like the separate the metrics we look at into 2 buckets.

In Bucket #1 we have social metrics.

In Bucket #2 we have business metrics.

Now let’s see what specific metrics are inside of each bucket. And let’s figure out how to craft a narrative that ties social metrics to business outcomes.

Social metrics

Here’s a shortlist of the metrics I look at in my social media reports:

• Follower growth

• Impressions

• Engagement rate

• Sentiment (aka vibes)

These metrics tell us what content is working on-platform. Usually, these will improve pretty early on if you are following content best practices. With clients we onboard at Compound, we see improvements to their social metrics within ~2 weeks of rolling out the content strategy.

B2B leadership is quick to dismiss these as vanity metrics. Don’t.

Social metrics are leading indicators for pipeline. Buyers don’t materialize out of thin air. They don’t wake up one day and spontaneously decide they need your product. They must discover your company somehow.

Social metrics improvement is a sign that more buyers are discovering, and engaging with, your company.

[I unpacked this more in my piece What’s the point of a B2B organic social strategy?]

Business metrics

These are going to be a bit more dependent on your business. But if you’re in B2B tech, this list will likely include:

• Deals closed

• Inbound DMs from your ICP

• Sales calls/demos booked

• Reply rate for cold outbound

• Win rate on deals where the prospect interacted with your social content

If I attached a heart rate monitor to all the CEOs reading this piece, I’m 98% certain I would see a mass increase in beats per minute because of the excitement of hearing all this talk of ‘ROI.’

Lol.

If you’re launching a social content engine from scratch, or trying to revive a dying social presence, it’ll take longer to see real outcomes here than it will with the ‘social metrics.’ These business metrics are a lagging indicator of having built an engaged audience on social.

The specific timeline for social ‘working’ to generate pipeline is so dependent on the company, but if you’re not seeing signs of life in ~3-6 months, you’re likely doing something wrong.

A note for content teams. We just talked about how it’s easy for B2B leadership to dismiss social metrics. It’s just as easy for content teams to dismiss business metrics.

I get it. We want to create compelling content. Just post great content for a long enough time and the business outcomes will take care of themselves, right?

That may be true. But you need to have a way to quantify this and show it to leadership. Proper reporting and narrative building are how content teams manufacture buy-in for long enough that the compounding effects of content kick in.

The content professionals who master this skill will get more promotions, more resources for content projects, and find themselves spared more often if layoffs hit the organization.

The closer you are to the revenue, the safer your position is.

What are you looking for?

Pattern recognition is a skill every B2B marketer should master. Social media professionals are assassins when it comes to spotting patterns in content.

Here is a list of 5 questions to hone your skills at identifying patterns in your content:

• Are there any topics that lead to better post performance?

• Are there any topics that lead to more lead generation?

• Are there any formats that lead to better post performance?

• Are there any formats that lead to more lead generation?

• Are there any features that when highlighted, seem to get more traction on social?

You’ll then use the insights you gather by going through this exercise to inform new experiments and adjustments in your content strategy going forward.

Pro tip: don’t overwhelm yourself with adjustments.

As you’ll see when I share my template with you in a bit, I only highlight 3 active changes at a time. This is the second layer of pattern recognition—discerning which trends will make a real impact if acted upon. This is another example of the classic Pareto principle (AKA ‘80/20 rule’) in action.

Here’s an example:

Earlier this month I was looking through my X content and noticed something. Long-form posts with media were getting way more reach than long-form posts that were text-only. The text-only posts were getting wrecked by the algorithm.

I also looked around and noticed the same across top creators on the platform (you should always corroborate your findings with other accounts in your niche).

So, I shifted my content to include an image when I was making a post that I wanted to perform as best as possible.

Another example:

I was examining a client’s content for our monthly reporting and noticed something interesting.

There was one pain point that, when highlighted in content, led to better content performance than others.

This is a sign to include more of that in future content batches.

This type of pattern recognition isn't rocket science. The gist of it is to do more of what’s working and less of what’s not.

That said, don’t overcompensate. You know when you eat one of your favorite foods too often and end up getting sick of it? Or when you take a song you’re obsessed with and play it until it triggers a mild form of PTSD when you hear it come on in shuffle?

This is what happens when you algorithm chase too hard. It’s a fine balance.

A warning for you.

Do not over-optimize content for ‘lead gen.’ It will backfire.

It’s kinda like if a consumer brand ran only retargeting ads on Facebook. In the short term, the media buyer would look like a genius. Look at all those sales!

One problem. Once the media buyer exhausts the bottom-of-funnel audience that those retargeting ads hit—they’re screwed.

Sure, if you go from not posting on LinkedIn at all to spamming webinar links to the timeline, you might get a few signups. If you post only customer case studies or feature rundowns, you might get a handful of demos.

But those people were going to buy anyway. They were at the bottom of the funnel. Once you exhaust those warm followers, the faucet is going to run dry.

The best B2B social strategy finds the right balance between audience expansion and audience conversion.

A percentage of your content should be engineered to go ‘niche viral.’ This type of content would be thought leadership, entertainment (like memes), etc.

Another percentage of your content should be engineered to convert those new followers into either customers or email subscribers. This type of content would be social proof (like case studies).

You need both. Now, let’s take a look inside my Social Media Report template.

How I package my social reports (my template).

All of the reports I send to my clients follow a similar 3-part structure:

• DATA

• HIGHLIGHTS

• OPPORTUNITIES

In the DATA section, I list all of the social metrics from each of the accounts we manage for that client. I will also include any business metrics we have access to—though this is harder as an agency since we don’t always have direct access to all of that data. If you do, include it.

In the HIGHLIGHTS section, I list 3 specific wins from the timeframe of the report we’re looking at. There are always wins to highlight. As a B2B marketer, you need to be your biggest hype man.

Whenever possible, tie the wins you share back to business outcomes. This is how you get your CMO or founder to see the value of content.

For example, if you saw an increase in impressions, don’t just highlight the increase in impressions. Tie it into how you’re getting more eyeballs on your product from your ICP.

Craft the narrative. It’s one of the most important skills you can learn as a B2B marketer.

In the OPPORTUNITIES section, I make note of 2-3 initiatives the social/content team is working on in the next month. Again, I tie these back to business outcomes the C-Suite would give a crap about.

It’s important to highlight the projects you’re working on because it shows the value you’re continuing to provide. You’re only as good as your last at-bat.

This is most important on the agency side. Even if your accounts are performing well, your client wants to feel like you’re adding new value. Again—craft the narrative.

Keep your reports simple. Your leadership team already has enough emails and Slack messages to sift through. Make it easy to see what’s going well, what you’re working on, and how it ties to ROI.

Do this, and you’ll have no problem building buy-in with your boss.

If you want the Notion template I use for reporting, you can grab a free copy of it here (ungated). Just duplicate the template and have at it. It’s stupid simple, so no promises of fancy functionalities.

TL;DR

A few key takeaways for you to remember from this piece:

• Takeaway #1: You can see how social media ‘works’ for your B2B company by looking at SOCIAL metrics and BUSINESS metrics. Social metrics are leading indicators for business metrics (you need to fill the room before you sell to the people in it).

• Takeaway #2: You must get proficient at crafting the narrative. How does social media content performance tie into revenue? What new projects is your marketing team working on and how will they generate ROI? Sometimes you need to get creative.

• Takeaways #3: Another skill to master—pattern recognition. Spot trends and topics that are leading to better performance and/or lead generation. This just takes practice.

• Takeaway #4: Your reports should be short and sweet. Present relevant data. Make it clear what’s working and what you’re working on next. 3 sections: Data, Highlights, Opportunities. You can use my Notion template here if you want.

One more thing. If this was helpful, share it with your marketing team in Slack. I always appreciate it.

That’s all I’ve got today.

SPONSORED BY MEASURE STUDIO

My Roman Empire as a SMM? 

Reporting. 

I'm never not thinking about it. Individual post stats, weekly recaps, mega monthly reports…

Yes, data is valuable.

But, collecting data and putting it into slides wastes so much time. 

I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it….

Measure Studio is the best social analytics tool. 

I’m not exaggerating when I say their reporting system pulls data from all platforms and makes slides in seconds. 🤯🤯🤯

Stop wasting time creating reports, start your free 14 day trial of Measure Studio.

🗃 FILE CABINET

Here’s my favorite marketing and business content I bookmarked this week.

• 13 B2B social media mistakes that drive me insane by Tommy Clark (shameless plug)

• Wanting by Luke Burgis (great read)

Check these out.

BEFORE YOU GO…

As always, I appreciate you allowing me into your inbox every week—I don’t take it lightly!

As a reminder, Social Files will be 100% focused on B2B social & content going forward (just resurfacing in case you missed my announcement of our independence a couple of weeks ago).

Social Files will be the definitive resource for B2B social media and content strategy by the end of 2024, and I’m stoked about it.

If there are any topics you want me to write about, reply to this email and hit me up.

Talk soon,

Tommy Clark

PS: I’m hiring Copywriters for Compound Content Studio. If you want to join the best agency in B2B social content, here’s a great opportunity :)