We’re all guilty; we concentrate on the number of followers brands get on their social channels. In addition, the number of likes a post has accumulated on social media seems paramount. Yet for Steve Moskovitz, Oracle’s global director of social media, concentrating only on followers is the wrong way to measure success on social, particularly for B2B brands.
“With an ad you can see its effectiveness by measuring whether or not your audience liked it or commented on it or shared it,” he says in an interview. “These are 3 different levels of emotion. A like is not bad. A comment means you sparked something in your audience such that they wanted to comment about it. A share means the ad was so good your audience members wanted all their friends to see it.”
He continues, “The way the algorithms work, if a person doesn’t engage with something, eventually it will disappear from the feed…that’s why you have to provide content that people will engage with.”
The trouble is Moskovitz believes many brand executives still value the wrong KPIs when it comes to social media.
“You may have to explain to a CMO why a page like doesn’t matter,” he says.
“What matters is whether or not people are engaging with what you’re posting...If you’ve built up a community you want to make sure followers are hearing you and are responding to what you have to say.”
Still, executives will urge, “Let’s get more followers,” he says. “In B2B, we’re still too focused on likes and followers…while [likes and the number of followers] should be promoted, they should not be your main focus…in B2B [as to opposed to B2C] it’s not as much about building up your audience, it’s about building up the right audience. When you’re selling to CTOs you don’t care as much if a college student in Illinois is following your channel. You want to make sure you come off as an industry leader,” he says.
Give Your Audience What It Wants
And how can a brand come off as an industry leader? Every brand needs to sell, of course, and Moskovitz believes social “is still more about brand awareness than driving leads, although you can drive leads if you’ve built up enough credibility with [the customer].”
At the same time, “people don’t always want to hear [a sales pitch for your brand] when they go on social…if you’re always sell, sell, sell, they won’t click on your posts,” he says. “Social has to be about the audience…they want your content to help inform them, educate them or entertain them,” he says. “Post entertaining content once in a while and they’ll follow your brand, then the next time you post serious content it will show up [in their feed].”
Reporting Results
We find readers want to know how other communicators report social metrics to the C-suite, so we ask Moskovitz. “I like to report [social results] in a meeting because there are so many different parts…and everybody always has a lot of questions.”
One of the first things he reports is about his brand’s social audience and what it wants. The tendency of marketers is to put a new product on social and tell audience members “why they want to buy this...but social is a different audience. People aren’t going on social with the mindset that they want to be sold to, they are going on there because they want to be informed, they want to learn new things and they want updates and useful information…so…looking at your audience members, understanding what they’re talking about and what they need” is critical, he says.
The two KPI’s Moskovitz values are "engagement and the other is just the eye test. I want to see if my content actually is powerful enough for people to cause an action...and the eye test just boils down to knowing your channel and seeing how each post performs compared to the average."
Although it’s a B2C, Red Bull [Red Bull] “does an amazing job” on social, he says, “because they” employ “a lot of user generated content, they engage with their followers [and]…they’re marketing on just about every post, but you don’t feel like [it’s happening].”
For Moskovitz, social “is all about adjusting…it’s not that executives can’t learn or are unwilling to, it just shifts so rapidly that you have to be very fluid and not be afraid to fail…and the only way with social is trial and error, you have to be able to put yourself out there.”
Note: Hear more from Steve Moskovitz by attending PR News’ Big 4 Social Media Conference, August 9-10, The Grand Hyatt, San Francisco. For information: http://bit.ly/2upXeZM
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Takeaways
- For B2B, it’s critical to attract the right audience as opposed to merely a large audience.
- Social is not all about your brand and its sales pitches. It’s about what you can offer your audience that will be valuable and informative.
- A key to social media effectiveness is adjusting rapidly to its quickly changing environment.