Unfortunately, thanks to the occasional viral sensation on social media, it’s often seen as a ‘quick win’ for most companies. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

Social media was intended to be a platform to build communities on. If your goal is to become a ‘viral sensation overnight’, you’ve already failed social media. Even if your post reaches 1 million people organically, that doesn’t mean you’ve created a loyal following and will consistently achieve similar results. 

Consistency is the key to success when it comes to sites like Facebook, and nothing measures this more than the real engagement you see on every single one of your posts – not just one. 

Ditch the spreadsheets

It’s with this same mentality that we can become over-dependant on the need for big numbers and fancy graphs to justify, or create our own ‘success’. 

The time I see companies spend logging every social media metric on a spreadsheet is time that I see wasted. These precious hours every week could be used crafting and building on already successful social campaigns.

The problem with trying to get meaningful results from something like ‘likes’ and ‘follows’ is that vanity metrics don’t translate very well into the real world. We are quick to prioritise the ‘million views’ milestones without prioritising our actual business; put simply, a million followers means nothing, if only 3 of them actually care. Instead, we should focus on creating and building an audience that actually matters through consistent, valuable content. The numbers just come with time. 

The best ‘report’ you can do on social media is through the medium of your own two thumbs, not excel sheets. The best insight you get into your audience is through your comment section, and how they are engaging with you, and you with them. 

Start understanding audience sentimentality with regards to your posts, and you’ll start to build more successful campaigns from these. 

Trust the Process

Social media is a community building tool, not a sales platform. And no one knows this better than the people who specialise in social media.

Managers of all levels in marketing and business need to understand the marketing strategy, so everyone is singing from the same hymn-sheet. You don’t directly have to be involved with the process; just be aware of what’s going on. Having CEO’s phone up marketing managers mid-afternoon to explain tweets they’ve spotted from the company accounts is not only a little embarrassing, but a huge waste of time on both sides. (Yes, I have experienced this, can you tell?) 

The disconnect is most businesses have their marketing department or social media team deploying a 12-month strategy and campaign and the CEO or board of directors wanting an instant insight 4 days in. By ensuring that everyone understands what your social media channels are actually for, and how to measure that data through audience engagement with those posts (in the form of comments), you’ll have a much more effective way of ‘reporting’ on social media.

This is the first mindsight I address with my clients when working on longer-term, slow burning content marketing strategies. 

Become involved

The companies that you see ‘best performing’ on social media are those with a CEO that is highly involved and innovative in their marketing. It allows the company to have clear, long-term direction in their strategies. Their tactics may change, but the strategy doesn’t.

Gary Vaynerchuck of VaynerMedia is a wildly obvious example, but aside from marketing agencies, one look at Elon Musk’s Tesla is a great example. Elon Musk’s personal brand alone is enough to drive the company, so much so, that Tesla themselves do not do any direct marketing. 

The higher the involvement in the company, and the higher-level the strategy, the more durable it becomes. 

Let’s set the scene: You’re happy to leave your entire social media and marketing down to Sarah. At best, she’s super experienced in building brands, she creates awesome content and strategies that help build your audience immensely, at worst, she’s past the typical requirements that a business sets for becoming a social media manager: she’s the youngest in the office and has more than 106 followers on Instagram. However, you don’t know that Sarah is about to quit her job on Monday, and that by Tuesday afternoon, you have no strategy.

Typically, CEOs and marketing managers tend to hang around a little longer. Not only that, but what changes beneath them doesn’t affect overall strategies too much. I use CEOs as an example, because it’s much easier for them to picture strategies over a 10 year period, they often don’t expect to be anywhere else. 

However, most CEOs make the mistake of relying on only spreadsheets and powerpoints for their insight, meaning they have no context or understanding of why numbers could be up or down for any given time period. It’s no good looking at weekly spreadsheets. Stop analysing things in 30 day terms, and instead start looking at the next 30 years. 

Instead focus on looking at audience sentimentality. What are people actually saying on your posts? When you can answer this question, reporting the numbers is nowhere near as important as reporting the feedback.