Maximize your social strategy with Hootsuite Impact

To get the most out of Impact, learn how to use its advanced reporting capabilities to get insight into your social return on investment (ROI).

Know your overall business goals

When reporting on social ROI, you’ll want to first review your overall business goals so that you can tie these back to your social account activity. Taking this step will help you define the key performance metrics you want to track and improve for each account.

For example, one of your business goals may be to increase sales leads for your established North American markets. For your newer European markets, your business goals may be more focused on establishing a presence in the market. So your North American social strategy might be focused on driving conversion metrics, such as completed Google or Adobe goals. For your European social strategy, you might focus more on brand awareness and engagement metrics, such as impressions and likes.

Many metrics in Impact are mapped against a basic customer journey through a typical marketing funnel. Metrics are available at the page (account) level or the post (content) level. Some metrics are available at both levels. For more information, see Metrics in Impact.

Customer journey stages

• Affinity - How does your audience feel about your content?
• Awareness - How much of your audience is your content reaching?
• Consumption - How much of your content is your audience consuming?
• Conversation - How much is your audience engaging with your content?
• Intent or conversion - Is your content driving conversions on your website?

Customize Impact to your business

You can customize Impact in two ways:

• Create custom metrics - Impact includes metrics for both organic and ad accounts, as well as the option to customize existing metrics based on your needs.
  
  This customization capability makes it easy for you to report on the things that matter to your business. For example, if you want to capture a custom post-level engagement rate that includes only comments and shares, you can create this metric in Impact in Analytics. Learn how to create a custom metric.
  
  
• Set up custom ROI metrics profiles - In the Impact ROI Analysis view, ROI metrics profiles help you measure and report on your social ROI for each social post, each social account, and all social accounts combined. With custom ROI metrics profiles, you can define the metrics that you want to track and analyze for each social account, in a weighted manner, with the help of your Hootsuite representative.
  
  For example, if you want to drive brand awareness for your new French Facebook Page, your metrics would likely be top-of-funnel metrics, such as impressions, reach, and likes. If you consider likes to be more valuable for driving brand awareness, you might have the likes metric equal 3 points per like and the impressions metric only 1 point per impression collected.

Prove your social ROI using web attribution

Plan ahead and use link tracking settings to associate a unique post ID with each of your social posts. For organic posts, you can set this up through Hootsuite. For ads, you must set up link tracking directly within your social network ad account. Using post IDs allows you to connect web conversion data, such as a completed Google or Adobe goal, to your social post. It also helps attribute activities like purchases or requests for sales demos to your social efforts.

You can also use web attribution data on a post level, combined with filters and sorting options, to understand which posts and social accounts are driving the most conversions for your business, such as page views, sign-ups, or downloads. You can then use this information to drive future social strategy.

Analyze your data on a deeper level with customized auto-tagging

Automatically adding tags to your posts makes segmenting and analyzing post-level social data easier. With the help of your Hootsuite representative and preconfigured rules, you can use customized auto-tagging on your organic and paid social posts.

For example, if you wanted to track engagement across all organic and paid posts for your healthcare business that include the keyword “research,” you could use preconfigured rules to identify all applicable posts and auto-tag them with a “Research” label. You could then group and analyze posts by this label in Browse Content, Impact Content, Filter Content, and post-level tiles in the My Analytics section of Impact, allowing you to identify the parts of your strategy that are performing best more efficiently.

Gain insight into your overall social strategy with customized dashboards

If you’ve ever wondered which of your social accounts has the highest follower count, or which of your regional brands leads in terms of brand awareness or community engagement, you can use My Analytics dashboards to see this data. You can combine multiple metrics and social accounts into segments, across all social networks, and view them in one chart.

To get started, we recommend going back to your business goals. The organization of your business and its goals should inform how you choose to view your data. A parent company with multiple brands, a company with multiple product verticals, and a company that operates in multiple geographical locations would each have different business goals and might approach dashboard creation differently.

For example, a food manufacturer with multiple brands might consider creating tiles to track key metrics across all brands, such as social account followers. Each segment of the pie chart would represent the total number of followers across all social accounts for a particular brand. This data would give the company an overview of its social footprint and a visualization of how all its brands compare in terms of social media awareness.

Another company might want to discover what’s driving the most impressions between organic Facebook content and Facebook ad content. To find this data, the company could create a chart in its dashboard with two segments, one containing all organic Facebook social accounts, and the other containing all Facebook ad accounts.

Monitor your social performance with reports that align with your business goals

To bring all of your Impact data together, you’ll want to report on your overall social ROI. The social metrics you report on will likely be tied back to the social goals for your social accounts (such as brand awareness), which in turn feed into your business goals for a product, service, or industry (such as increasing market presence).

When reporting on your social ROI, you’ll want to consider your internal audience’s goals and interests. For example, an executive-level report might provide an overview of your social efforts and successes, whereas a report for social and marketing teams will likely include more in-depth insights.

You can create reports in a few places. Here are some common and recommended use cases for creating reports:

• Campaign report - Browse Content (post-level export) or Filter Content (roll-up)
• High-level social ROI overview - Hootsuite Analytics (Page-level scheduled export)
• Social-network-specific in-depth report - Hootsuite Analytics (Page-level scheduled export)