3 Key Performance-Tracking Features in the Updated Social Reports Dashboard

Good news: Social Reports has undergone a makeover! This new update features a beautiful and intuitive visual design. What's more, instead of focusing the tool on reach metrics, such as "Like" and "Followers," Social Reports is now focused on website traffic and engagement metrics from interactions and clicks.

Why the change? How can you exercise the tool to get more from your social? Check this out:

As growth marketing expert and Co-founder of ContentMarketer.io Sujan Patel wrote:

"By measuring how potential customers engage with your website and your social media presence, you'll be able to develop a far better understanding of whether your marketing efforts are working."

This means, your social media is your boots-on-the-ground for understanding your marketing's effects in the field. This is why the updates to the Social Dashboard are key: it now reports that intel on visits, contacts, clicks, and interactions back into your overarching inbound efforts.

Here are three quick ways you can flex the Social Reporting Dashboard's updated data orientation:

1) Clarify and communicate your social media's engagement impact

As a social media marketer, you know communicating your social media engagement's value as part of your integrated marketing strategy has long since been a challenge. Let's face it, there's no easy way to show how metrics like impressions or follower count translate into the bottom line. This may be because it’s already well established that reporting on "vanity metric's" impact to the bottom line is a bad idea.

Jason Amunwa, Director of Products at Filament put it well when he said:

"Vanity metrics do nothing for your actual website objectives, but make your marketing efforts look good."

This new design helps you invest more into your social media strategy while concentrating on growing your community and brand. It'll also grant you latitude to drive qualified traffic to your owned channels.

2) Use engagement metrics to measure your brand's communal interactivity

Engagement metrics are important when using social media as a tool to cultivate community because they allow you to measure the actions taken by community members when interacting with your brand. For example, if you publish a post to your LinkedIn account it may receive 500 impressions and 15 likes. While this may indicate that your content resonates well with your audience, you want to measure the number of clicks on that piece of content in order to know how many people actually consumed it.

When focusing on community you'll also want to pay attention to the less quantitative metrics such as customer quotes or issues that are resolved through your social media channels. The new social reports dashboard does some of this work for you by providing a list of your top performing messages that you can filter by "clicks" or "interactions."

3) Measure traffic to your site to gauge your social media's viability as an acquisition channel

HubSpot's Social Publishing tool already does some of the work by creating shortened tracking URLs for each social message sent and allowing you to tie each message to a campaign. This makes it easy for you to measure each campaign's performance in gathering new visitors and leads.

A successful inbound social media strategy both seeks to cultivate a strong community and aid in acquiring new business. Be aware that social is not a free channel anymore. In fact, social media spend is projected to be 34.5% of total digital marketing spend in 2017, which is up nearly 10% since the early days of 2013. As a result, you're going to need to using social media in a strategic way to use inbound to optimize your social media channel performance.

So it's time to leave the vanity metrics in the past and focus on measuring ways the metrics that can help you grow your business.

If you'd like to access the new Social Reports Dashboard, you can join the beta here.