Opinion | China’s stock-market frenzy reflects social media’s growing sway over investors South China Morning Post
* This article was originally published here
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The 21 essential social media metrics you must track for success in 2024
Key Takeaways
- Social media metrics are essential for measuring the effectiveness of your strategy. They go beyond surface-level numbers to reveal how well your content resonates with your audience.
- High engagement rates—likes, comments, and shares—indicate that your audience is connecting with your content. Monitoring these metrics not only boosts your reach but also signals to algorithms that your content is worth sharing, further expanding your audience.
- Metrics like follower count, demographics, and sentiment provide valuable insights into who your audience is and how they feel about your brand.
- Metrics related to conversions, such as conversion rate and click-through rate (CTR), highlight how effective your social media efforts are in driving desired actions, like sales or sign-ups. Tracking these metrics allows you to see the return on investment (ROI) from your social campaigns.
Social media metrics allow you to track every detail of your social media performance. This is great for honing your strategy, but it can also lead to information overload because there are so many metrics and graphs to choose from.
To help narrow down your social media reporting to the most important data, we’ve selected the top 21 social media metrics you need to track to understand your social success and where you can improve.
Follow along to learn more about the key metrics you need to track for your business.
What are social media metrics and why do they matter?
Social media metrics are data points that measure how well your social media strategy is performing—and help you understand how you can improve.
They’re like scorecards for your online posts and interactions, showing how many people saw, liked, shared, or commented on your content. Social media metrics also reveal how much effort and money you’re spending and how much you’re getting in return.
This is not about vanity (or vanity metrics). Social media strategic planning and analysis require tracking metrics to understand your business’s social media activity.
Without metrics, you can’t create an informed strategy. You can’t tie your social media efforts to real business social media goals or prove your success. And you can’t spot downward trends that might require a change in strategy.
Still stumped? Keep reading for a complete list of the essential social media metrics to track in 2024.
21 key social media metrics to track
We’ve broken down the 21 key social media metrics you need to keep an eye on into six different categories to help keep you organized. Follow along to get a better understanding of each metric and how to track it.
Engagement metrics
Social media engagement metrics show how often people interact with your content. These are valuable metrics to track for a couple of reasons.
First, engagement shows that your audience is interested enough in the content you post to take some kind of social action.
Second, engagement sends powerful signals to the social media algorithms, which can help expand your reach.
1. Engagement rate
Engagement rate measures the number of engagements (likes, comments and shares—each of which we’ll be explaining in more detail below) your content gets as a percentage of your audience.
How you define “audience” may vary. You might want to calculate engagement relative to your number of followers. But remember that not all your followers will see each post. Plus, you might get engagement from people who don’t (yet) follow you.
There are multiple ways to calculate engagement. So many, in fact, that we dedicated a whole blog post to the many ways to measure engagement rate.
One of the most common ways is to add your total likes, comments, shares, and saves, and divide the total by your number of followers. Then multiply by 100 to get a percentage.
You can also use our free engagement rate calculator to measure your engagement rate by post, account, or campaign.
Note: If you’re calculating your account’s total engagement, include information about all your posts (e.g., total number of posts published, total number of likes, and so on). If you’re calculating the engagement rate of a specific marketing campaign, only include the details of the posts that were part of the campaign.
Psstt: Check out some average engagement rates for various industries and platforms to see if yours are on track.
2. Likes and reactions
Your likes refer to how many people have physically “liked” or “reacted to” one of your posts. While many people consider this as more of a vanity metric, it still plays a big part in your engagement rate.
Especially as more platforms (like Facebook and LinkedIn) introduce reactions, this metric will also help you gauge actual sentiment about each post. Are people laughing? Do they support your social media content?
Alternatively, you can look at the number as a whole to get an idea of how many people thought your post resonated well enough with them to take an action while they scrolled, no matter how minor.
If you’re tracking your likes, you may simply want to keep a counter going to watch these engagement metrics grow. For example, look at how many likes your content gets each week and/or month to make sure it’s increasing.
3. Comments
Another great measure of engagement is the number of comments you receive on each of your posts. A like or reaction is a simple, easy action to take—but leaving a comment means your audience actually has something to say.
Trish Riswick, Social Media Manager at Hootsuite, shares this sentiment: “The comment section is filled with inspiration and feedback, but it’s also a great metric to track as it demonstrates the effectiveness of your posts and the increase in love from your followers.”
This is another metric that you can track so you can make sure your comment section is growing over time. As your audience grows and becomes more invested in your brand, your comment count should grow, too.
4. Shares
This is the biggest indicator of how much your audience likes your content—their interest in sharing it on their own pages so that their friends, family, and followers can see it.
Riswick explains, “In our 2024 Consumer Report, we found out a lot about why people share content on social. The biggest reason (44%) is because people agreed with the post. 29% of respondents said they shared something because they found it informative. While 24% said it was because a post was inspirational.”
However, Riswick notes that “whatever way you cut it, sharing a piece of content is an emotional response and a testament to how well your content landed.”
Keep track of how many shares your content gets over a certain time period to make sure it’s growing. If you ever see a drop in shares, go back to see what type(s) of content receive the most shares, and create more of that content.
Reach metrics
Reach or social media brand awareness metrics show how many people see your content and how much attention your brand gets on social media. These are important social media metrics to pay attention to as they help you get an idea of how large your online audience is.
5. Reach
Reach is simply the number of people who see your content. It’s a good idea to monitor your average reach, as well as the reach of each individual post, story, or video. You can also measure the overall reach of your account.
A valuable subset of this metric is to look at what percentage of your reach is made up of followers vs. non-followers. If a lot of non-followers are seeing your content, that means it’s being shared or doing well in the algorithms, or both.
6. Impressions
Impressions indicate the number of times people saw your content. You can measure impressions by post, as well as the overall number of impressions on your social media profile.
Impressions can be higher than reach because the same person might look at your content more than once.
An especially high level of impressions compared to reach means people are looking at a post multiple times. Do some digging to see if you can understand why it’s so sticky.
7. Social share of voice (SSoV)
Social share of voice measures how many people are talking about your brand on social media compared to your competitors. How much of the social conversation in your industry is all about you?
Mentions can be either:
- Direct (tagged—e.g., “@Hootsuite”)
- Indirect (untagged—e.g., “hootsuite”)
Essentially, SSoV is like a competitive analysis: how visible—and therefore relevant—is your brand in the market?
Not sure where to start? Hootsuite’s versatile social media management and listening tool can help with that.
Listening Basics allows you to use monitor conversations, SSoV, keywords, mentions, and hashtags, taking the guesswork out of your marketing.
However, if you want to go the manual way: add up every mention of your brand on social media across all networks. Do the same for your competitors. Add both sets of mentions together to get a total number of mentions for your industry. Divide your brand mentions by the industry total, then multiply by 100 to get your SSoV as a percentage.
Conversion metrics
Conversion relates to transactional actions, such as making a purchase or clicking through to your website from an ad or social media post.
While conversion is often used in advertising, being able to find these measurements organically is just as important.
8. Conversion rate
Conversion rate measures how often your social content leadsto a conversion event like a subscription, download, or sale. This is one of the most important social media marketing metrics because it shows the value of your social media campaigns (organic and paid) in feeding your funnel.
UTM parameters are the key to making your social conversions trackable. Learn how they work in our blog post on using UTM parameters to track social success.
Once you’ve added your UTMs, calculate conversion rate by: dividing the number of conversions by the number of clicks.
9. Click-through-rate (CTR)
Click-through rate, or CTR, indicates how often people click a link in one of your posts to access additional content. That could be anything from a blog post to your online store.
CTR gives you a sense of how many people saw your social content and wanted to know more. It’s a good indicator of how well different types of content promote your brand on social media.
To calculate CTR: divide the total number of clicks for a post by the total number of impressions. Multiply by 100 to get your CTR as a percentage. For more tips on optimizing your content, check out this guide on zero-click content.
10. Cost-per-click (CPC)
Cost-per-click, or CPC, is the amount you pay per individual click on a social ad.
Knowing a customer’s lifetime value for your business or even the average order value will help you put this number in an important context.
A higher customer lifetime value combined with a high conversion rate means you can afford to spend more per click to attract visitors to your website in the first place.
You don’t need to calculate CPC: You can find it in the analytics for the social network where you’re running your ad. However, the formula is still easy enough: divide your advertising cost by the total number of clicks.
11. Cost per thousand impressions (CPM)
Cost per thousand impressions, or CPM, is exactly what it sounds like. It’s the cost you pay for every thousand impressions of your social media ad.
CPM is all about views, not actions.
Again, there’s nothing to calculate here—just import the data from your social network’s analytics.
Audience metrics
These metrics help you better understand your audience—who it is, how large it is, and so on. This is important for improving your messaging and working on growth.
12. Follower count
How many followers you have across each of your social media channels is another great metric to keep an eye on to ensure your presence is growing healthily.
Riswick says, “What was once thought as a vanity metric was proven by our team this year to be very important. We found that 70% of people who follow a brand on social have explicit plans to make a purchase from them soon or in the future. Out of all the metrics, follower growth is also just a nice and quick way to see how your social media efforts are working.”
13. Follower growth
Your follower growth measures how many new followers your brand gets on social media within a certain amount of time.
It’s not a simple count of your new followers. Instead, it measures your new followers as a percentage of your total audience. So, when you’re just starting out, getting 10 or 100 new followers in a month can give you a high growth rate.
But once you have a larger audience, you need more new followers to maintain that momentum.
To calculate your follower or audience growth rate: track your net new followers (on each social media platform) over a reporting period. Then divide that number by your total audience (on each platform) and multiply by 100 to get your audience growth rate percentage.
14. Social media sentiment
Social media sentiment tracks the feelings and attitudes behind the conversation. When people talk about you online, are they saying positive or negative things?
Calculating social sentiment requires some help from a social media metrics tool that can process and categorize language and context. We’ve got a whole post on how to measure sentiment effectively.
15. Demographics
Audience demographics tell you details about who your followers are. Things like their basic makeup—gender identity, age, location—and some of their online behavior—like the time frames they’re online—can be found within your social media analytics.
Remember this as it can help inform your strategy, find the right times to post, and direct your marketing messaging.
Video performance metrics
Posting video content on YouTube and other social media channels? You’ll need to pay attention to these video-specific KPIs.
16. View count
Each social network determines what counts as a “view” a little differently, but usually, even a few seconds of watch time counts as a “view.”
So that you know exactly what to track, on the main video platforms, a video is counted when someone watches:
- YouTube: At least 30 seconds
- Facebook: At least 3 seconds
- Instagram: At least 3 seconds
- TikTok: As soon as your video starts playing
So, your video view count is a good at-a-glance indicator of how many people have at least started watching your video.
17. Video completion rate
Video views are great, but as we mentioned, they only let you know that someone started to watch your video. So, how often do people actually watch your videos all the way through to the end? Video completion rate is a good indicator that you’re creating quality content that connects with your target audience.
Video completion rate is also a key signal to many social media algorithms, so this is a good one to focus on improving.
18. Watch time
Your watch time refers to the total time that viewers spend watching your video content. It’s an important metric showcasing how interesting your videos are to your audience, and a great metric to track to ensure growth.
Customer service metrics
Finally, we have a few metrics that focus on how your customers feel about your brand and its customer service.
19. Average response time
Response time is a metric that measures how long it takes for your customer service team to respond to queries that come in through social channels. Think of it as the social media equivalent of time spent on hold.
Using AI customer service bots can significantly reduce response time for many simple requests.
If you’re using a social customer service tool like Hootsuite Inbox, you can add response time directly to your analytics report.
Otherwise, you can calculate it manually by: adding up the total time taken for an initial response to customer queries and dividing it by the number of queries.
20. Customer satisfaction (CSAT) score
Of course, customer service metrics are not just about response times and response rates. CSAT (customer satisfaction score), is a metric that measures how happy people are with your product or service.
Usually, the CSAT score is based on one, straightforward question: How would you rate your overall level of satisfaction? In this case, it’s used to measure the level of satisfaction with your social customer service.
It’s why so many brands ask you to rate your experience with a customer service agent after it’s over. And that’s exactly how you can measure it, too.
Create a one-question survey asking your customers to rate their satisfaction with your customer service and send it via the same social channel used for the service interaction. This is a great use for bots.
The formula: Add up all the scores and divide the sum by the number of responses. Then multiply by 100 to get your CSAT score as a percentage.
21. Net promoter score (NPS)
Net promoter score, or NPS, is a metric that measures customer loyalty.
Unlike CSAT, NPS is good at predicting future customer relationships. It is based on one—and only one—specifically phrased question: How likely would you recommend our [company/product/service] to a friend?
Customers are asked to answer on a scale of zero to 10. Based on their response, each customer is grouped into one of three categories:
- Detractors: 0–6 score range
- Passives: 7–8 score range
- Promoters: 9–10 score range
NPS is unique in that it measures customer satisfaction as well as the potential for future sales, making it a valuable go-to metric for organizations of all sizes.
To calculate NPS: subtract the number of promoters from the number of detractors.
Divide the result by the total number of respondents and multiply by 100 to get your NPS.
Psstt: For more details, check out our post that dives deep into customer service metrics.
4 tools to track your social media metrics
Are you looking to organize all your social media metrics so that you can easily create reports for your team? We’ve got four tool options for you to try.
A social media report template
First, if you’re a spreadsheet lover, why not just own it? There’s nothing wrong with using a basic spreadsheet and social media report template to manually track your stats and autofill formulas you’ve set up.
With your own tracking tool, you’ll want to include things like:
- Each metric you choose to track
- Each individual platform you’re tracking
- Graphs that help visualize growth
You can then pull your graphs and data from your spreadsheet into a documented report that you can share with your team.
To learn even more, watch our video below:
![YouTube Video: DEEP DIVE How to make social media reports [FREE TEMPLATE]](https://blog.hootsuite.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/How-to-make-social-media-reports.png)
Source: YouTube
Hootsuite
If you prefer a more automated version that’s in the cloud rather than in a document you created, Hootsuite’s social media dashboard is another incredible tool for tracking your social media metrics and compiling them into a digestible report.
Here’s how to use Hootsuite Analytics to set up a social media metrics dashboard that calculates and measures your metrics for you.
- Log into your Hootsuite dashboard and head to the Analytics tab.
- Click New Report. Scroll through the various reporting options and templates to create a custom report template based on the metrics you can most about. Note that once you add these metrics to your social media metrics dashboard, you don’t need to remember the formulas anymore because Hootsuite will calculate them for you.
- Head to the Benchmarking section on Analytics and click Competitive Analysis. Choose your social profiles and add competitors to compare your performance to the competition.
- Also under the Benchmarking section, click on Industry, then choose your industry to benchmark your performance against your industry as a whole. This is the tool we used to gather the benchmarks listed throughout this post.
- Track your social media customer service metrics using the Team Activity tab.
Check out this video that runs through some of the most important ways you can use the metrics in this post—and in your Hootsuite Analytics dashboard—to answer real business-oriented questions related to your social media performance.
Source: YouTube
Talkwalker
Talkwalker is a consumer intelligence platform that has its own Hootsuite app so that you can use it with your Hootsuite account.
With the tool, you get advanced social listening features so that you can monitor your brand mentions and sentiment across a number of online platforms and publications.
This can be hugely helpful for both your audience and customer service metrics. Make sure you have a finger on customer sentiment so you always know how your brand is being perceived.
Meta Business Suite
Finally, the Meta Business Suite is a good option for smaller businesses that might not yet have the budget to take advantage of third-party software. If you have a presence on platforms like Facebook and Instagram, Meta Business Suite is the perfect analytics solution.
Connect your Facebook Page and Instagram business account to use the singular Meta dashboard to access your analytics, messages, and more.
How to use social media metrics to improve your strategy
So why is it important to monitor your social media metrics? Why do they matter? Well, it’s because understanding your overall performance is key to improving your social media marketing strategy.
This means you can grow your online presence faster, increase your social media ROI, and, of course, make your bosses happy, too. And who doesn’t want that?
By paying attention to your social media metrics, you can pinpoint exactly what content types and topics your audience is most interested in. After all, those will have a higher reach and more engagement than posts that don’t quite hit the mark.
You can also use your metrics to identify trends and patterns. Is there a certain product or service that tends to get more attention online than others? Not only can you work to promote that product or service more often, but you also may consider offering similar new options because obviously, what you’re already doing is popular.
And finally, your metrics help you better understand your audience and what they like. Pay attention to your comments, read and respond, watch for popular content, and analyze online brand mentions.
And apply everything that you learn to your existing social media strategy. A strategy is a living document, always changing based on one thing: your analytics. This is why knowing which social media metrics to track is such an important task.
The post The 21 essential social media metrics you must track for success in 2024 appeared first on Social Media Marketing & Management Dashboard.
* This article was originally published here
Wednesday, October 2, 2024
How to set a smart social media budget (and get it approved)
Ah, the social media budget. For many social media managers, putting together (and justifying) financial asks is an anxiety-inducing annual event.
However, budget time is also an important chance to prove the value of your work. Creating your budget highlights the scope of your ambitions for the year ahead – and should also highlight the return on investment from the budget invested the previous year.
If you’re feeling stressed over what you’re asked to accomplish with your budget for social media, know you’re not alone.
Key Takeaways
- Your social media budget should include more than just ads. Remember to factor in content creation, tools, and even influencer partnerships to cover a well-rounded strategy.
- Stay flexible. Leave room in your budget to adapt to trends. Social media is fast-moving, and you’ll want the flexibility to pivot when necessary.
- Don’t forget about tools. Social media management and AI tools can help streamline your efforts and boost productivity. They’re an investment that pays off in efficiency, so make sure to budget for them.
What is a social media budget?
A social media budget is a document that specifies how much you plan to spend on social media over a specific time. It’s usually annual, but could also be broken down by month, by quarter, or even for a specific campaign.
Budget information is typically presented in a simple spreadsheet, but it’s not uncommon to see social media budgets in project management tools. Whatever tool you use, make sure that the data is clearly presented and easy to understand. It should allow you to track expenses over the course of the year to help you analyze where you’re spending money and measure your return on investment.
What expenses should your social media budget include?
Your budget for social media is not just the amount you spend on paid ads (although that may be a significant line item!). Here are all the factors to consider when planning your budget.
Content creation
Content is and always will be king. Many social marketers spend more than half of their social media campaign budget on content creation.
Here are some line items you might want to include in this budget section:
- Photography and images
- Video production
- Talent, i.e., actors and models
- Production costs, i.e., props and location rentals
- Equipment, such as microphones and lighting
- Graphic design
- Copywriting, editing, and (possibly) translation
Costs will vary significantly depending on how custom you want your project to be.
For example, you can get started with photos and graphics from a free stock photography site, in which case you can budget $0 for photos. However, if you want a more custom approach, or you want to show off your specific products, you’ll need to hire a photographer.
Likewise, your video production costs will vary significantly depending on whether you shoot quick Reels from your phone or hire an agency.
This is one area where AI tools can have a significant impact on your social media budget. They can’t take over your content creation tasks completely, but they can help speed up content creation tasks and boost your team’s creativity.
If you haven’t tried AI for content creation yet, we suggest doing so before planning your next content creation budget. Hootsuite’s free AI content creation tools can help you understand the potential impact of AI on your content budget.
Keep in mind that you do not need to create content for every single social platform. (Although, if you want to, tweaking content for various platforms is one task you can assign to AI.) Brands are focusing their social budget on the platforms where they see the best ROI, and you should too.
Source: Hootsuite Social Trends Report
Social advertising
When planning your social media ads budget, remember that the goal is not always (or maybe not ever) an immediate sales conversion. Social ads bring people into the top of your sales funnel so you can convert them to customers through a combination of organic and paid future posts.
Source: Hootsuite Social Media Consumer Report
For this reason, social ads are a valuable budget line item for many businesses. If you haven’t yet tried them, it’s worth experimenting to see how they impact your results.
We recommend starting small and scaling vs. budgeting thousands of dollars for paid campaigns when you’re not fully sure of what works and what doesn’t.
To get you started, here are the minimum spend amounts required to run a campaign on each of the major social networks. The minimum spend won’t get you access to all advertising options or a lot of exposure, but it does give you a sense of how little it can take to get started.
- Facebook: $1 per day
- Instagram: $5 over 6 days
- TikTok: $20/day for ad groups or $50/day for campaigns
- LinkedIn: $10 per day
- Pinterest: $0.10 per click
- X (Twitter): No minimum spend
- Snapchat: $5 per day
To calculate how much you should spend on your next Facebook ad campaign based on your revenue goals, try our free Facebook Ads social media budget calculator.
Pro tip: For more tips and insights on combining paid and organic, read Paid vs. Organic Social Media: How to Integrate Both into Your Strategy.
Software and tools
To run effective campaigns on social media, you need a tech stack. A social media management dashboard is a must for anyone running campaigns on more than one channel. Hootsuite plans start at $99/month.
Beyond that, there are a LOT of options for tool categories that can make your life easier and improve results.
Costs for these tools range from free to hundreds (or even thousands) of dollars per month. If you’re adding new paid tools to your budget, include a cost analysis to show how the tool will pay for itself. Increased productivity is a great place to start.
Don’t go overboard here. Look for tool categories that align with your most important strategic social goals.
- Design and editing tools
- Social video tools
- Social media collaboration tools
- Social media management tools
- Social media monitoring tools
- Social listening tools
- Social inbox tools
- Social media scheduling tools
- Sentiment analysis tools
- Competitive analysis tools
- Social media advertising tools
- Social customer service tools
- Social media analytics tools
- Content marketing tools
- Content curation tools
- AI content creation tools
- AI marketing tools
- Social media automation tools
- Social media security and risk management tools
Agencies and contractors
It can be tempting to tackle everything yourself, but that’s often not realistic. Whether you’re short on specific expertise or simply don’t have the person power to implement all your strategies, agencies and freelancers can be a good way of expanding your team without additional headcount.
Agencies and freelancers also allow the flexibility to ramp up when needed without committing ongoing resources to a staff position. Since you hire for specific skills, you can save time on training and onboarding.
How much should you budget for freelancers and agencies? A good guide to freelancer rates in 2024 can be found on the Editorial Freelancers Association website:
- Graphic design: $47.50–$85/hr
- Copywriting: $62.50–$100/hr
- Copy editing: $50–60/hr
- Translation: $50–70/hr
Influencer marketing
Working with influencers (aka content creators) is an easy way to expand the reach of your social media campaigns.
How much budget you allocate to influencer marketing will depend on the type of partnership with the influencer, the size of their following, and the campaign you’re running (format, channels, goals, etc.).
Influencer rates vary, but in general the minimum to work with a nano-influencer (up to 10,000 followers) is $2–25, while the minimum to work with a mega-influencer (1,000,000+ followers) starts at $1,200 and goes way up from there.
Some nano- or micro-influencers might also be willing to use an affiliate commission structure.
Don’t forget to include budget for boosting influencer posts.
Contests and giveaways
Social media contests and giveaways can be an effective way to build brand awareness, increase engagement, and grow your following. They can also help you bring in a library of user-generated content. But you need to dedicate some budget to the rewards you’ll offer for participation.
The best case scenario here is to offer your own products or services as a prize. It limits your budget commitments while also exposing people to your offering and potentially getting additional social content after the prize is rewarded.
Partnering with another brand can provide a way to offer a larger prize without a larger budget expense, like Porter Airlines and Visit the USA did here:
When budgeting for giveaways, don’t forget to include rewards for internal contests and rewards. Employee advocacy is a budget-friendly way to dramatically increase your social media reach. A little healthy competition (or random giveaways) can help increase uptake in your advocacy program.
Training and development
Social media changes fast, and your team’s roles can change and grow equally quickly. And your team is likely figuring a lot of things out on the fly. Colleges and universities are just now starting to offer social media training, and most social media managers have no formal education in the field.
If your team members are ready and willing to invest their time in developing new skills, it’s a good idea to enable that through your social media budget. You’ll be the beneficiary of everything they learn.
Depending on your team’s skill levels and campaign needs, these are a few training options you should consider including in your social media budget:
- Hootsuite Academy. A catalog of certification courses taught by industry pros and tailored for businesses. (Cost: $99 to $999)
- LinkedIn Learning. A library of more than 18,000 expert-led courses with the ability to create custom learning paths for employees. (Cost: $379.88 per seat/year for small teams.)
You could also consider allocating an education budget to each employee per year so that they can select the training that makes the most sense to them.
Social strategy and management
Social media management is not all about execution.
Beyond the obvious tasks of creating and scheduling social posts, your social team engages with social fans, provides social customer service, and manages your social community. They use social listening to learn about your target audience and alert you to potential threats and opportunities. They create a social media strategy and — yes — manage social budgets.
All of this requires an experienced social media manager.
When building this role into your budget, consider that the average salary for an in-house social marketer is US$72,133. A freelance social marketer earns $72,929 on average, and an agency social marketer earns an average of $83,328.
5 tips to get your social media budget approved
1. Align your social KPIs with business goals
It’s all well and good to say that you want to grow your follower count or increase engagement, and that you need to spend money to do it.
But how do those goals relate to the larger business strategy? It’s much easier for stakeholders to approve your budget request if they see that your social goals align with business objectives as a whole. Especially since those stakeholders might not have a great understanding of how social works.
Demonstrate that you follow the SMART goal-setting framework. This ensures goals are both relevant and achievable – important factors in any budget negotiation.
Make sure to include relevant KPIs in your budget request. These show that you’ve intentionally aligned your social goals to the overall business plan.
2. Understand your performance and ROI
The old saying goes that you have to spend money to make money. Showing that your social team is a profit center rather than a cost center makes it easier to justify further investment in your work.
When looking at your social ROI, be sure to consider factors beyond straight sales conversions. Social is often about growing brand awareness and loyalty, thereby increasing lifetime customer value.
If you’re struggling to understand and achieve ROI, embrace a performance marketing strategy.
3. Share case studies and success stories
Be prepared to highlight your biggest wins. Use your analytics tools to find campaigns that exceeded expectations. Look for spikes in conversions or revenue and track them back to specific content or campaigns.
Think creatively here. Successes to highlight could include new partnerships formed, new influencers identified, or shares from major social media profiles.
4. Include a competitor analysis
Understanding how your brand’s social efforts compare to those of competitors is important for budget decision-makers.
First, a competitive analysis shows how much effort your competitors are putting into the various social platforms. It also allows you to highlight the kinds of content they’re creating. If they’re posting at levels or standards you just can’t match, you may be able to justify greater budget for content and campaign creation.
A good competitor analysis also includes the results your competitors are seeing from their social efforts. This can also help to rationalize the additional resources you’re asking for.
All of this also shows decision-makers that you’ve done your homework. You’re not just pulling numbers out of thin air – you have studied the competition and understand what it takes to compete in your field.
5. Be specific — but leave some room for unexpected expenses
An effective social team is nimble. Leave some room in your budget to respond to social trends.
For example, it’s a good idea to ask for an overall social ads budget rather than to lock budget into specific platforms. You can include amounts per platform as a guideline, but ensure your team has the ability to reallocate budget on the fly based on real-time performance.
Average social media budget in 2024
General marketing budget
Let’s start by looking at the average marketing budget as a whole. Gartner’s 2024 CMO Spend Survey found that marketing budgets as a whole fell 15% this year to 8.4% for B2B brands, 7.9% for those with an even mix of B2B and B2C, and just 5.7% for B2C brands.
Source: Gartner
So for a company with $1 million in total revenue, the total marketing budget would be as follows:
- B2B: $84,000
- B2C: $57,000
- Even mix: $79,000
Social media marketing budget
CMO Survey found that in Spring 2024, 11% of the marketing budget on average was dedicated to social media. However, this also varied between B2B and B2C brands.
Source: CMO Survey
Let’s apply that math to the numbers for the total marketing budget above, again assuming $1 million in total revenues
| $1 million revenue | Marketing budget | Social media budget |
|---|---|---|
| B2B Product | $84,000 | $6,132 |
| B2B Services | $84,000 | $7,476 |
| B2C Product | $57,000 | $9,234 |
| B2C Services | $57,000 | $9,633 |
It’s interesting to note that while B2C brands have a smaller overall marketing budget, they actually have more to spend on social media than their B2B counterparts.
It’s also worth noting that CMO Survey expects the percentage of budget dedicated to social media to increase substantially across all economic sectors within the next five years.
3 tools for social media budgeting
1. Hootsuite’s free social media ROI calculator
Source: Hootsuite
Calculating ROI is a critical part of budget negotiations. It can also eat up too much of your time doing math. This free tool calculates ROI for you. If you’d like to take a different approach to ROI, check out our post on how to calculate ROI.
2. YNAB
Source: YNAB
Originally developed as a personal budgeting tool, YNAB can also work well for small teams that need a simple way to plan and track social media expenses. It allows you to create your own categories and track expenses as you go.
3. Hootsuite Analytics
Hootsuite Advanced Analytics provides organic, paid, and web metrics in one dashboard – including ROI and conversions reports. You’ll always have access to total spend and total return, broken down by network and even day of the week. This makes it easy to understand which strategies are working and where you should adjust your budget.
It also includes robust competitor analysis features so you can understand how your results compare to the industry average and specific other brands.
Save time managing your social media presence with Hootsuite. Publish and schedule posts, find relevant conversions, engage your audience, measure results, and more — all from one dashboard. Try it free today.
Do it better with Hootsuite, the all-in-one social media tool. Stay on top of things, grow, and beat the competition.
Free 30-Day TrialThe post How to set a smart social media budget (and get it approved) appeared first on Social Media Marketing & Management Dashboard.
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