8 social media metrics that matter to your B2B SaaS business

In order to make B2B SaaS marketers’ lives easierVijay Mandeep, Marketing Manager, CleverTap shares a list of social media metrics to track that actually matter. 

Change is one of the most exciting aspects of digital and social media marketing. It is also one of the most challenging aspects. Social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter constantly announce product updates, release new features, change policies and update algorithms that affect and influence the way we devise and approach our campaign strategies.

But what could be the key to optimizing your social media performance even with all these changes?

Data! Yes, it is right in front of your eyes, at your fingertips to be observed, measured and acted upon. Measuring the data from these campaigns should always be your top priority. Analyzing the data on campaign performance will help you determine which strategies are working and which aren’t. However, deciding on the right set of metrics can be extremely challenging.

B2B SaaS businesses operate in different tangent altogether. B2B marketers’ are well aware of the fact that social media marketing for B2B SaaS is not an easy nut to crack. They don’t run campaigns that are the likes of celebrity, media & entertainment, e-commerce, fashion brands etc. These businesses are either product driven or service driven. The target audience for such product/service is niche and are different from traditional demographics. Moreover on social media the target audience slims and becomes very niche.

Anyone who’s marketed a SaaS product would know how tough this job is. And it’s even harder when you’re marketing a product only to a certain number of B2B companies. So in order to make B2B SaaS marketers’ lives easier, I decided to list out various metrics to track that actually matter.

Social Media Metrics That Matter To Your Manager

1. Impressions Vs Reach - Impressions are the total number of times a particular ad from a campaign was seen by any number of users. While reach is the total number of people who saw a post. The difference seems very miniscule. For instance, if a user sees the same ad twice, it would be counted as two impressions and one reach.

Now, which one do you track?

Let’s say your campaign goal is to show your ad a specific number of times to your target audience in order to increase brand awareness, then impressions are the appropriate metric to consider. But if your campaign goal is to get your ad seen by a specific number of people or to get the word out to as many people as possible, then reach is the ideal metric to look at. It completely depends on what your campaign goal is.

2. Engagement - Or what we usually refer to them as likes, retweets, shares, comments, follows, etc. While these are usually overrated in terms of its importance and correlation for driving ROI, it is helpful to any brand for sake of visibility and user psychology in terms of interesting content. Although it is not reliable as compared to link clicks, it surely can help increase your reach and impressions when more people interact with your content. For instance, if you do work for a SaaS business where social media branding is important to its content marketing strategy, then Twitter retweets/likes don’t directly reflect on to your ROI but become legitimate metrics to keep track of in your campaign. This helps in understanding the likeability of a user towards the content piece you have generated.

3. Link Clicks - In both Facebook Insights and Twitter Analytics, you can see overall clicks on your posts for all your campaigns, not only that but you can see each campaign's link clicks and can also break it down further to see specific ad set’s link clicks. Unlike engagement metrics, link clicks are the most important since they show the most relevant form of engagement to your campaigns. This helps you analyze and understand your audience’s interest to learn more. This also helps you to track their journey from your website if a pixel code is set up.

Source: Twitter Ads Manager

Source: Facebook Ads Manager

Also Read: #Report Video budget to increase by 68%: Straightforward B2B Marketer’s Guide

4. Optimal Time - It’s always good to know when your audience is most likely to engage with your content. It plays a vital role in your content distribution strategy. It also helps you tailor your content strategy so you can write the content piece that works and post it at the right time and the best days of the week (i.e. when your audience is most active).

There are various tools that can help you determine your follower base and give you an analysis of their active times and dormant times. I use followerwonk by moz which gives you granular data of your user/follower base to help you determine the best time to publish/post on social media platforms.

Source: followerwonk.com

This chart breaks down the hourly Twitter activity of your followers.

Social Media Metrics That Matter To Your Management

1. Traffic - Use Google Analytics to find out what kind of traffic you’re getting from social to your website and how that traffic performs once it arrives onto your website.

For instance, if one or more social channels aren’t bringing you the expected number of click-throughs, use can this data to improve your call to action and campaign strategy.

How to find out social referral traffic:

Under Acquisition in the left navigation bar, click on the Social top-level menu. And under Social, click on Overview or Network Referrals.

2. Brand Mentions - Your brand custodians, prospects and customers are out there talking about you. In that case, you would definitely want to be a part of that conversation. Brand mentions are key to your brand image. You need to be aware of such mentions all the time and the reason for your brand mention could be anything. You don’t want it to be negative and you also know how fast the word spreads on social media.

For this reason, it is important to track your mentions. Both on Facebook and Twitter, you’ll get notifications whenever someone tags your business/username in their post/tweet. But if people are not directly tagging you, then a third-party tool to keep track of such mentions will definitely come in handy.

3. MQLs - Marketing Qualified Leads, these are the outcomes of the specific campaigns (Lead Generation) for your gated content assets that you run across various social media platforms. Usually, these are the first entry of contact into your CRM or any database that you hold to sort and save your online leads. These leads are qualified by the marketing team to help sales increase their funnel size for prospecting more leads into their pipeline.

4. SQLs - Sales Qualified Leads, these are the outcomes of continuous nurturing of your MQLs through the means of emails, retargeting ads, demo ads, PPC campaigns etc. Once your MQLs buy-in on your quality of content and the information on product/service they are ready to talk to sales. That is when these leads are converted and are qualified for sales.

Below is the lead lifecycle:

Source: smartbugmedia.com

Social media for B2B SaaS is picking up slowly and marketers are now tapping the true potential of this multiverse. It isn’t just some vague, unmeasurable benefit to your B2B business. There are all sorts of metrics but it is key to know which are vanity metrics and which aren’t. And that data can be leveraged to ensure continuous improvement, optimization, and effectiveness of campaigns.