When a brand wants the biggest, broadest TV audience, the solution is often advertising during live sports. For the same reason, the social media accounts of sports leagues and individual teams is some of the most valuable real estate for sponsored content on social media.

Sports fanbases are loyal and extremely engaged, and paid partnerships with the most popular leagues and teams often means brand messaging is seen by a far wider audience than through owned organic posts.

For the following report, ListenFirst analyzed the sponsored content posts of the MLB, NHL, MLS, NBA, and NFL at both the league and team level between July 2020 – June 2021 to determine the tactics and best practices that are most effective for brands around these paid partnership posts.

Social media listening is a great way to measure the conversations happening and to analyze the sentiment around your brand. However, with listening alone, you’re only hearing from the vocal minority.

The majority of your consumers are not the ones making noise. They’re busy living their lives and showing you how they feel by click-based engagement with your post.

In this report, we’ll share why social listening isn’t enough and why analytics is critical so you can focus on the data that really matters to help grow your business.

According to the 2020 CMO Survey, only 30% of CMOs believed they could prove the impact of social media efforts quantitatively.

So if you find it challenging to prove the value of your social media campaigns, you’re not alone. The key to successfully measuring the impact of your social media efforts hinges on leveraging social media analytics.

At ListenFirst we’ve helped leading brands across the world determine their most relevant KPIs. We’ve learned a thing or two over the years and have a few tips to get you on the right track.

There are three critical steps to ensuring you have the right elements in place to measure your social media marketing program effectively. You’ll find the steps below, along with tips to get you started. 

Identify the metrics that align with your business goals.

When it comes to setting KPIs that will have an impact, less is more. 

Start with your business goals. How do those translate into social metrics or outcomes? For example:

• Do you want to grow awareness? Consider metrics related to audience growth. 
• Are you set on increasing brand affinity and loyalty? Review engagement rates. 
• Is brand love your focus? Look at social sentiment.

Follow a thoughtful process when determining the metrics that are important to your business. 

Use social media analytics to set realistic benchmarks.

It’s critical to outline your goals and do industry research prior to determining the most logical KPIs for your brand. 

Of course, you want to look at historical trends for your brand as well as for your competitors. But there’s also a lot to gain from reviewing other aspirational brands who’ve accomplished what you are after. Even if the brand is not a player in your industry, validate that what they’re doing is something that may have translated to their success. 

Then ask yourself what’s a reasonable expectation for your brand based on the historical data and performance across other brands?

Download our report How to Maximize Social Media Analytics for more details on how to identify the metrics that matter. 

Track your KPIs frequently

Reporting is key. Once you have your KPIs set, you have to constantly track them. 

Reporting that allows you to see all of your cross-channel data in one view is essential. You’ll also want to set up reporting that will allow you to see the most important metrics, including your benchmarks and historical trends, at a glance.

Dashboards are a great way to communicate the story the data is telling to your key stakeholders. ListenFirst recently added configurable dashboards to the platform, giving users the opportunity to build a series of dashboards to best match their team’s goals.

Read more about configurable dashboards.  

If you’re like most brands and increasing your investments in social media, be sure you have a plan in place to know if you’re moving the dial. Follow these three important steps and let us know how we can help along the way.

Brands depend on social media to reach customers… but how do they make sense of all the data available to them in an ever-changing world? Most brands find that they have too much data and not enough answers or that they’re having to pull reports manually, which is very time-consuming.

This report shows you how to measure your social media program more effectively and uncover the insights to help you grow your business.

Once you’ve read this report, you’ll be able to easily identify the metrics that matter and prove the value of your social media strategy.

Data is only valuable with context. It’s important to benchmark against your own performance, but benchmarking against competitors takes your social media strategy to another level. Competitive data opens up opportunities. It helps brands understand industry benchmarks, set tangible goals, identify strategies for growth, prove ROI and so much more. 

 In this webinar, you’ll learn the best ways to leverage ListenFirst’s curated universes of more than 250,000 brands to strengthen your social strategy.

Some audiences are very “vocal” on social media. As a result sometimes your team has to drop everything to react, or worse – revisit your campaign strategy altogether. Before shifting directions, it’s important to dive into the data to assess how the situation will  impact your brand, if at all. 

In this webinar, hear from Meghan Cahill, SVP Customer Experience and Devin Carroll, Director of Revenue Strategy, as they help brands understand why analytics are critical when it comes to understanding what your audience really cares about.