Bridging The Gap: How to Connect Social Media Interactions to Business Growth

In every meeting we have about social, there's one question that’s top of mind for all our clients: How do we connect our social media interactions to tangible business growth? It's a complex problem, but one that has a relatively straightforward solution.
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Understanding the Complexity

For most brands, their social media strategy has exploded over the past 10 years to encompass multiple business objectives (brand relevance, community management, consideration, and conversion) for multiple products/services, with content coming from multiple sources (employees, agencies, influencers, executives and consumers) AND across multiple channels (META, TikTok, Twitter, Snapchat, etc.). All of this various social activity and content is likely decentralized across the organization, creating a disconnected consumer experience and making it very difficult for marketing leadership to understand which content is most meaningful to the business and why.

Performance marketing teams often get the lion’s share of the social budget, because the creative is the most straightforward to produce at scale and the easiest to show direct business value. Meanwhile, brand & community activities are often undervalued, because measurement dashboards stop at “how many interactions did I generate?”.  

However, as social media targeting algorithms decline due to more stringent consumer privacy restrictions, the importance of organic and influencer programs increases. It’s important to now broaden the aperture and look at the impacts of both organic and performance marketing programs as a cohesive ecosystem that work in concert to drive the brand and consumer experience.
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The Solution: Build A Holistic Social Strategy & Measurement Approach

Given the growing importance of social programming in your overall marketing mix, it’s important to evolve the measurement approach beyond a few social specific KPI’s and attribution tracking to create a more holistic measurement framework that encompasses your full social strategy. 

This point of view is also being reinforced by Forbes, emphasizing the significance of integrating brand building and performance marketing, “these two elements work hand in hand to drive success in the digital age.”

Harvard Business Review also echoes this sentiment, highlighting the importance of aligning your brand and community building efforts with clear, measurable metrics.

In other words, measuring the success of your social strategy shouldn't be limited to just engagement and reach, but should also consider how it contributes to your overall brand building and performance goals.

Here are some provocations to help jumpstart your social measurement evolution:
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Social Measurement Provocations

📊 How Do you Evaluate Brand Relevance and Community Building Performance Today? Ideally, there are agreed upon evaluation criteria for these activities at a company level that you can ladder your social activity KPIs to.
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🎯 Do You Put The Same Rigor on Setting Brand & Community Growth Targets As You Do Performance Marketing? Creating and Aligning on performance targets across your full funnel objectives will inherently create greater focus and value of your brand and community activities to the organization. 
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📈 Do Your Measurement Capabilities Extend Beyond Activity Reporting?  While you cannot directly attribute a consumer's interaction with organic social content to sales the same way you do with paid social ads, top companies use regression models and media mix modeling to correlate brand/community/influencer/PR activities and spend with sales. 
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⚖️ Does Your Measurement Plan Include Checks and Balances? Specifically, do you evaluate the balance of your activities and understand how performance marketing activities influence your brand/community initiatives, and vice versa? This knowledge will be the compass in determining if your investments are optimizing or undermining your other objectives.
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It's crucial to acknowledge that the path to measurable business growth through social media isn't always straightforward. While immediate correlations may sometimes elude us, consistency and patience in your efforts will yield valuable insights over time.
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Pulling It All Together

By embracing this holistic approach and following our framework, you'll be better equipped to validate your full social media strategy and investment. The synergy between brand building and performance marketing, supported by robust metrics and correlation models, will lead you down a path where your social media interactions and business growth are inextricably linked. 

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If you find yourself with similar questions and welcome some honest counsel, let’s talk. Visit us at www.consiglieri.co.