We all need something to measure and when it comes to social media, it’s far too easy to take impressions, engagements and followers as your metrics of success. I don’t actually think that’s all that helpful and sends the wrong message about what corporate social media is for.
Consider these three issues.
- Impressions, engagements and followers are not entirely in your control. LinkedIn changes its algorithm all the time and it’s notoriously secret about it.
- Thanks to research from experts unaffiliated with LinkedIn, like Richard van der Blom, we know that company page content now makes up just 1.5% of the average feed post – with the rest of the space taken up by ads and personal profile content.
- Content that works well on LinkedIn often doesn’t align with how businesses want to be talking about themselves – for example, photo montages of teams participating in office socials or charity work far outperform product posts and thought leadership articles.
This means you can ‘manipulate’ your metrics by posting culture content but you might well hear critiques from your executives who want to see less frivolous posts and more thought leadership.
The same thing is true for followers – once you reach a critical mass, you’ll start to see a snowball effect where your followers are growing without you really having to do much. That might look great, but dive into the demographics of who those followers are and you might be less enthusiastic, with a large majority of students and jobseekers joining your follower ranks.
If that’s true, then what is the point of corporate social media and how can you assess how well you’re doing? I’ll concede that it is still important to measure something and that can be challenging.
A more holistic approach
Businesses should think about their corporate LinkedIn presence in the same way as they think about their websites. While people might not actively follow a business page and read every update, when they’re considering a new service or during a pitch/sales process they will likely check that business out online. If a business is going through a transformation like an acquisition or making layoffs, it’s highly likely that people (journalists, analysts, employees) will visit your public facing profiles to find out what’s going on.
In my opinion, the best corporate social media channels out there are the ones that leave you with no doubt what matters to this company and what it does – everything needs to be intentional from how the page is structured, to what you’re talking about, and how it looks. If that’s your goal, that changes how you measure success. It becomes less about impressions and followers, and more about consistency and quality of storytelling.
We’ve built an evaluation rubric that we use to help quantify corporate social media. It’s based on six categories, scored out of 5:
- We start with how frequently a page is posting (more is not always better)
- Second, we assess fundamental channel hygiene like word count and image specs.
- We look at quality of content, which includes whether posts display a clear purpose and how relevant the messaging is to the industry.
- Brand consistency assesses whether branding is represented in all facets of social content and through the entire user journey.
- There is a separate category for clarity of user journey, which focuses on where each post fits in the content funnel and how it guides readers to take further actions.
- The final category is evidence of cohesive strategy which aims to understand whether content is channel specific, both in its narrative framing and its visual format.
People matter
When you’re talking about corporate social media, a B2B business cannot ignore its people and their social activity. As I previously said, just 1.5% of feed posts are from company pages, so businesses are missing out on a huge amount of potential visibility if they are posting on their company pages and leaving it at that. People respond to people.
63% of people say CEOs who have social profiles are better representatives for their companies than those who do not. LinkedIn is one of the only places for executives to dialogue directly with customers – to be authentic, real and sensitive and show strong leadership. While your CEO may be shy, there’s really no substitute for them to be active and engaged on the platform.
Company pages still have a role to play in building and maintaining a brand’s image online. But how to spend that energy and how to measure success needs to reflect the more nuanced realities of the moment. While this might be slightly harder to explain to stakeholders – if you set and follow a concrete, measurable set of desire outcomes, you are still able to show value on the platform.
