0:00
Jennifer Gutman
So I want to go ahead and welcome everybody on over to the Oktopost webinar. Today we have a real treat in store. We're going to be discussing reporting with confidence how to measure B2B social media. Joining me today is a woman who I admire, and you'll see why in just a moment. But before I give and introduce the lady of the hour, I will introduce myself. My name is Jennifer Gutman. I am the director of customer marketing here at Oktopost. I've been with Oktopost since 2014, so I've definitely seen many versions of Oktopost and have had a great time working with all of our customers. And here with me today, to join me in Talking about measuring B2B social media is the one, the only, Jessica Skarinsky, social media manager at benefitfocus. Jess, could you go ahead and introduce yourself and perhaps give a fun fact. Thank you.
0:58
Jessica Skarzynski
Thank you so much. What a warm welcome. Thanks, Jen. I am so excited to be here. Like Jennifer said, I am Jessica Skarzinski. I'm the social media manager at benefitfocus. I've been with benefitfocus for a little over a year now, but I've been doing social media and marketing for over 15 years now, so I can't believe I can actually say that. Yeah. So I'm thrilled to be here. And let's see, for a fun fact, I've been waffling over what fun fact to give you, but I think I'm going to go with a little bit of a safer one. I am now currently training for the New York City Marathon that's happening in November. So I do believe that this is the first time that Jennifer is actually seeing me, not a sweaty mess, like actually in human clothes with makeup on and with jewelry. So this is, this is a big moment for me.
1:47
Jennifer Gutman
We're so happy to have you here. We're wishing you much success in the marathon. We'll have to send you some little opties over to cheer you on.
1:54
Jessica Skarzynski
Love it.
1:55
Jennifer Gutman
Speaking of little opties, so you can see here on the right, our chief Mascot officer will be joining us as well. So I want to go ahead and get started and. Right. Really what prompted this webinar is what I like to call the B2B social media measurement dilemma. And essentially what I call that. Right. Is the fact that social media managers everywhere are hired to do a job. And you're, you know, we're hired to create content, to create good content. We're writing catchy headlines and hooks and we have to be Engaging. And we have to, you know, increase engagements, and we want to grow brand awareness. And there's all of these initiatives that we're hired to do at the same time. Right. We need to come into these positions really knowing how to report with confidence, especially in an area when you're reporting up the chain. Right. Not always. Does the executive team quite understand. Maybe they don't understand the value of social, or they understand the value of social. But what exactly does a like mean? Right. So I call this the social media measurement dilemma. And so the goal of today's webinar is really to understand what management perhaps can expect from social media managers, which metrics we should be focusing on as social media managers. And I'd say this is a loaded question. We could be here for hours and then is there an industry standard for setting up cadence? When you check your numbers, how. How do you action this, this data, this social engagement data, and what do you do with it when you're looking at it? Right. Because if you can't make sense of the data, what's the point of even measuring it in the first place? And then what can be learned over a year from the social media engagement data? So before going forward. All right, I guess we're stuck. Give me one moment. Okay, There we go. Before going forward, I just want to take it back. Right. What you're about to see today is how Jess walks through and understands and is able to take her social media to new heights. And what I will caution. Right. And Jess, you can keep me honest. There is no social media management playbook. And I think that's one of the biggest challenges with being a social media manager is that we really need to stick together to understand and speak to one another. And why I pulled up what I did on my screen right now as we go in to kind of understand what we seek to solve at the end of the day. B2B Social Media Management. While. Yes, right. We need to be as creative as our B2C counterparts when it comes to B2B and B2B marketing in general, we kind of have one goal in mind to really understand at the end of the day where leads or where engagements or where that first touch of interaction is coming from. So, so with Oktopost, and we're going to get into this in a little bit, you know, going through the different dashboards on the social bi with Jess. But really right on day one, if somebody engages with your content on, let's say, Twitter. Right. Unless you have a way to go ahead if you're using Oktopost, for example, or you're integrating your social engagement data into your marketing automation, you really have no way of understanding where that first touch comes from. And I think that that's right when you're, as we spoke just a moment ago, when we're thinking about reporting up to the executive level, these are the circles that I want you to remember. Right. Because at the end of the day, we really truly need to understand that digital footprint, or social journey, if you will, to try to understand and make sense of these engagements, to understand how social is impacting the business. So before we get into that, I'm going to pass it over to you, Jess. So can you help us understand, can you help us zoom in on what statistics or measurements matter to you right now? And where are you focusing when you're making sense of your data?
5:54
Jessica Skarzynski
That's another loaded question. But, yeah, thank you. So, I mean, when it comes to what statistics matter to me, I mean, I even have to kind of take a step back and look at really, where does the, the, where does the social media content even come from? And at benefitfocus, we really believe that good content is the foundation of those marketing efforts. Webinars, video interviews, thought pieces on emerging trends in the benefits admin field, you name it. It's my job as the social media manager to kind of get involved in that creation of the content so that I always have an eye towards how to translate it to a social audience. Because, you know, then what happens when it's translated is then that's how we measure the success of it and then we kind of go in an endless loop. But so when it comes to, you know, what statistics matter, when I'm looking at how that data, that content performs vanity metrics like follower counts and the sheer number of posts, those are things that, you know, they look good in a PowerPoint. And I've seen plenty of companies kind of use those metrics to measure success. But I'm a firm believer in the fact that they don't really reflect the work that we are doing to connect with our audience, to drive engagement and to really widen that sales pipeline. So that said, I like to focus on things like engagement rate impressions, things like that the algorithm changes implemented by every platform. What seems to be like every other week now can have a huge negative impact on things like follower count and even your reach. And you have essentially no control over that. Your reach can drop with the push of a button, just like we're seeing on Instagram right now, as they're kind of deprioritizing static images in favor of reels. I mean, not even talking from a corporate standpoint. My own Instagram account was seeing, you know, maybe 300 to 1,000 likes on, on any given post. But since they made that switch to really focusing on reels, I struggle to break 80 likes on just regular images. And though I find that reels are getting many more interactions. So, you know, you have to kind of, you know, be aware of what that data is and grow and shift with it, but also know that you need to report out on, you know, what actually is making a difference. So when you focus on things like your engagement rate, you're really, I feel, getting the clearest picture of how the people you are reaching are responding the content that you're putting out and then that in turn can drive the content strategy in a more focused way. And we kind of go around. So what we're seeing here is this, the engagement versus impressions kind of thing. That's kind of, you know, the, the next piece of what we're going to talk about.
8:25
Jennifer Gutman
Absolutely. Jess, I just want to interrupt you for a moment because I think when it comes to impressions versus engagements, we're talking about, you know, engagement rate. I think this is kind of that drill down like, yes, you need the engagement rate to get keep a pulse check right on your seasons and to keep a pulse check on what's going on. But if you really want to drill down and even go back to that dilemma, right, we are hired with the goal of we want to go ahead and grow brand awareness, right? So that's essentially impressions and reach, right. The more people that see our posts the better. But there's that dilemma, right? Because if your impressions are increasing but your engagements are staying the same, or vice versa, right. Your engagements are increasing, which is fantastic, but your impressions are staying static, right. That's not really the formula that we're looking to crack yet. I don't think any social media manager, I'd be quite surprised if every single month, year over year, everything is in line and you know, in parallel increasing and increasing and increasing and that's almost what makes the job fun or hair pulling, whichever you want to.
9:30
Jessica Skarzynski
Yeah, different definitions of fun, but yeah, definitely. Yeah, you know, that's perfect example. You know, this is what we're looking at here. This is, you know, the number of engagements compared to the number of impressions over the same six month period. And you know, to your point, the fact that the impressions and the engagements do kind of mirror each other with those spikes in you can see in March and May, that's the key. But the next step in that story, just like everybody on this call is probably aware of, is where did those spikes come from? Of course, you report this data up, your manager, your executive is going to see those spikes and go, what happened? What did we do? We need to keep doing that. So I have to find out more about what it was that we did or how we got lucky those two months and figure out how to recreate that lightning in a bottle.
10:18
Jennifer Gutman
This is this right? What is this? Talk to us. What are we looking at right now?
10:22
Jessica Skarzynski
It's kind of a mess, but it makes sense. Obviously, any social media manager will understand. So March was a really busy month for benefitfocus last year, actually, you know, this year. So we had a lot of event prep and a lot of promo, which we may not always have at that time of year or at that level again next year. Think about it like this. So this was right when that big winter spike of the pandemic was kind of calming down. Events were happening in person again. People were really ready. It was almost spring. It was like spring fever. Let's get out there. Especially, you know, one or two of these events. One was in Vegas, one was a local race road race that we've participated in as a sponsor for many years. You know, so that excitement about being out there, being in person, that led to more engagement and that engagement being high. So we were attending event as a sponsor in Las Vegas, which we may do again next year, but those dates might be different. So when it comes to other events, you know, the people that were going to those events, they were traveling, they were posting about them and tagging us. You'll see a couple of the examples that are one of the examples that I gave here, there were many actually to choose from was, you know, our own teams were out there, you know, attending these events and tagging us and, you know, which we then shared. We can ask folks like, you know, our team to do that all we want, but it's hard to guarantee that, you know, the same amount of engagement year to year is going to. Going to happen for the same event. But then if you see on the right side of your screen, in May, on the other hand, that was when we announced our intern program using a new design template and kind of shout out system, which apparently was a huge hit. So every one of those images that you see there in that little grid, and there were so many more, I just couldn't get them all in one screenshot. But every one of those images was shared separately as its own post and featured one intern and gave some fun facts about them, what school they were going to, what department they would be interning in, things like that. This was the first year that we did this on this scale. There really hadn't been a focus on promoting the intern program at benefitfocus previously, and we really wanted to kind of blow it out there, really, you know, put the spotlight on these great people that were joining the company and kind of learning about getting their, you know, dipping their toes in the water of what they wanted to do. And now that we saw that, it led to a really good boost in engagement and a spike in impressions, because each of those people then shared to their own networks, which amplified our content, amplified our name. So we're hopefully going to do that, the same thing again next year. But this is all the kind of stuff that you have to take into consideration when not only planning out promotional content for things like events and looking at how you're going to measure data going forward, but when we look back at this year's metrics to determine what next year's goals should be, we can't guarantee that March's numbers are going to look like that because the event schedule may shift around. We don't necessarily even know what events are going to be returning. And is the excitement level going to be there? What is the pandemic going to do by then? We don't know. But may will hereafter be known as intern month in my book, because that was a real good spike.
13:34
Jennifer Gutman
Well, there you go. And I think you bring up a very valid point when it comes to understanding the data. Right. One of the things you want to look for is patterns or perhaps seasons. Right. So. So, yes, right. If you're looking year over year, as long as you're able to explain those dips or those, you know, I'll call them peaks. Right. That's really the meat. And what your executive team most likely won't understand. They want to understand how or what was driving those numbers, because those numbers in a vacuum don't mean much. Which leads me to my next question. And I've actually been asked this a lot, and I don't know if there's necessarily a best practice or a benchmark on this or every social media maybe has, like, a special planner, and we're all kind of doing the same thing. But when it comes to metrics, which cadence is important to you, meaning. Right. Like, are you. I mean, are you looking? Are you logging into the social bi, daily, are you looking, you know, hourly, minutely? If you're. Yeah, like secondly, what are you looking at yearly and daily? And what should we be looking at?
14:34
Jessica Skarzynski
Yeah, I mean the most important thing to remember when it comes to reporting out your metrics is there really is no industry standard on what or how often to share. When it comes to what I'm reporting out to my elt, my executive leadership team, I really look at monthly data. But you'll see here, these are basically the different things that I do daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annually. But they're not necessarily reporting out. They're not reports in the sense that you would think like, okay, I'm gonna have to go in and create this dashboard and make it look good and find the story and the data and report it out. A lot of this is really just my own daily because I am, I mean, obviously I'm on this call, I'm speaking about all this stuff. I am, I call myself the social media data ner. I will talk about this stuff all day. I love it. I do log in daily and I'm actually in there looking at it just because I find that interesting. But I'm not going to report that out. So yeah, on top of doing that daily, I'm just mainly just doing content moderation. Oktopost actually makes that really easy because there's like that little inbox thing. But then weekly, you know, I'm taking a look at how if there's like an event going on, how things are going there, how the content is performing, if there are, you know, anything, if there's anything that's jumping out that we might need to either change or address before we reshare this content out. Definitely that's, that's weekly is when I'm taking a look at that. Monthly though is really where I would say I do the most, the bulk of my reporting, where I report out to my alt, number of posts, impressions, engagements, engagement, rate, click through, rate, reach. But I also, you know, I keep track of all that stuff weekly as well. I also, you know, I like to say that sharing too much info can also, you know, it can rattle some folks the ELT level. Who might say that.
16:28
Jennifer Gutman
Can you? Can you? What do you mean?
16:30
Jessica Skarzynski
Yeah, I mean, I'm sure anybody, there's people on this call that have had this happen before where you put out the info, you know, you're familiar with the info, the data that you get and you see and you're, you know, there's always going to be those dips and those spikes from week to week, depending on, you know, if there was a holiday or if it's. If there was, depending on how small your organization is. If there was, you know, if it was winter and then suddenly there was some nice weather in your area, like, we would definitely see like, you know, numbers start to dip at the beginning of spring and summer because, hey, people aren't on social media that much, at least in the field I was in at the time. But, you know, sharing too much info and giving all of that data can rattle people because they, they see that and go, what do we do? We need to change things. And then before you know it, you're having to either explain why going and reach, you know, retooling your entire content strategy, social strategy for the next month is a bad idea, or even worse, you're actually having to go in and change it with, you know, no. No actual rationale, no real data behind it. You know, there's nothing worse than spending a day reassuring a VP that low numbers on a particular post because it's just the usual slowest day of the week on social media doesn't mean that we need to completely reevaluate our product strategy, which has happened many lifetimes ago. And I hope it never happens to anyone else on this call.
17:57
Jennifer Gutman
We've all been there. And listen, Jess, I actually have two questions that have come in for you, so I'm going to share them now. One question. There's a listener on board who has a CEO that feels that engagement of their own team is basically like yelling in a box. And that CEO only wants to be able to show the impact of non employees engaging with corporate. Is there a way to filter out employees to see the engagement metrics? So I can. On the Oktopost side, I can say, yes, there is, but I don't know if you, if you have anything to add there to that.
18:30
Jessica Skarzynski
You know, it's funny, actually, that was something that I did have kind of presented to me. That was a, you know, like, we need to, you know, analyze how much of this is actually coming from us. And unfortunately, there really isn't an easy way to do that. You know, there's no way. I had, you know, a couple people that were like, well, can't you just download the list of your Twitter followers? And I'm like, but that's, you know, if there's 20,000 Twitter followers and I'm having to go through manually and see which one, that's just not possible. That's why, I mean, I know it's funny that it is actually the perfect segue into talking about how in Oktopost, like we have the advocacy board, which that makes it so easy to be able to like and it makes it easy to be able to filter them out. But then it also can clap back at a CEO like that and say it isn't yelling in a bottle, it's actually doing this. And then you can present that engagement data and say, look at what our advocates are doing. I can even say, I mean, I, I would have to go back into my data, but I, I can probably pinpoint two or three campaigns in particular where advocate posts, internal employee posts, actually did better than the corporate posts. So yeah, it's, it's a struggle, but there are solutions out there.
19:47
Jennifer Gutman
Yeah. So I, so I'm just going to share. Jessica, you are getting a lot of questions coming in. And so what I'm going to do, we're going to drive through with some of the slides because some of the questions we will be addressing throughout, you know that I know we have a whole slide dedicated to employee advocacy versus so we'll get into that. And so one question I want, and you might not have the answer right now, but Michelle would like to know how many social bi boards do you utilize when you check on your data daily?
20:18
Jessica Skarzynski
I have, I want to say maybe like two to three of them. I've, I have one in particular that focuses on the audience. So on things like follower count, just because I like to keep an eye on those things. Obviously I'm not doing anything, you know, really crazy unless I see a huge difference. But like in that case, then I'm contacting Oktopost and being like, hey, can you just confirm that this is real? Because I don't see it. And it's kind of scary because we lost all of our followers. But no, but I would say, yeah, so I have an audience one and engagement one. The engagement one I would say is probably the one that I use the most because that's, I mean I can, I used to have one large one that was just all of these things, but I started breaking them out into audience engagement. And for a while when we were doing paid, I was, I had one that was just comparing paid to not. And then I have the advocacy board one too that I just kind of take a look at and see, you know, how our advocates are. So, yeah, I think you'd be pretty good to be able to break it down into those categories. There might be others, obviously, depending on your, your, you know, business.
21:18
Jennifer Gutman
But that's what I Do awesome, Jess. Thank you. And like I said, I'll throw out as I see the ones that are relevant. But thank you for answering that. I want to hop on back down and apologies, I'm having a bit of trouble with my arrows on my Mac today, but I want to go back into the. The campaign drill down, and I just want to make sure. One second. Give me a second. I'm really having some issues with my arrows. I love that.
21:45
Jessica Skarzynski
Flamingo.
21:47
Jennifer Gutman
There we go. Okay, so I want to. We were talking about campaigns. There's a question there that popped up about campaigns, and I just want to. If you could talk us through. Right. Because Oktopost is unique, and you and I have spoken about it offline quite a bit in that you can actually create different campaigns, which makes a lot of sense because then you can segment out your posts into these campaigns to be able to measure smarter. So I was wondering if you could talk us through, because I think, at least from my side, what I see is it can be a little bit overwhelming. That might not be the right word to create campaigns. Like, what's your. Like how. Well, what's a social media campaign? And how are you creating these? And what.
22:27
Jessica Skarzynski
Yeah, yeah, for sure. So, you know, in past lives when I would hear things, I would hear the phrase social media campaign, and it was generally around, you know, basically around projects that we would be working on. And I feel like that is one way of looking at them, but the way that I kind of choose to look at them at benefitfocus, which actually worked out much, much better, is basically by our audience. So, you know, benefitfocus is unique, but maybe not in that we market to a lot of different audiences with thought leadership and marketing content, but then we also market to our own internal audience and also even potential new employees with company culture posts and updates and things like that. And the one thing that I really love about Oktopost is I'm able to group those different audiences into campaigns based on the audience or the poster type that we're talking about. This is a snapshot of the top. I think it's like five or six in one month. But I drill down even further when I report out. But this gives me just the perfect, at a glance look at what went out to who, how they responded to it, and things like that. It's funny, the interesting thing that we found in looking at this data, and actually you and I discovered this while we were looking at it, is that, you know that campaign with the little yellow dot down there at the bottom? That or Yellow. Is it.
23:53
Jennifer Gutman
Is it yellow?
23:54
Jessica Skarzynski
No. Green Health plans. There it is down there. Yeah. You know, it's one of our most underrepresented audiences in terms of the amount of content that we produce and share to that audience. But it has the second highest engagement rate out of that data, period, which was really cool. And that's also a good example of why I won't focus particularly on the number of clicks, but the relative engagement rate to the number of posts as it's. It's really tough to balance that different. You know, it's tough to balance the audiences slash campaigns because, you know, that purple one up at the top that our employer, that's the one that we always expect to see. It's always going to be number one. It's our largest audience in the bulk of our business. But while it has the highest number of clicks, there's really not enough engagements to bring it up to that wow level of, you know, 5% or more. So.
24:46
Jennifer Gutman
Makes sense. Makes sense. And I think looking at this this way, and I love how you've segmented out your campaigns by audience, right? Because then if you're looking month over month or year over year and you're understanding your. These different audiences and you can see. Right. And this, right. This is a snapshot, as Jess said. So, right. In Oktopost, you can see posts, clicks, conversions. You know, you can really see every layer of metric that would be important to you in a campaign. And especially if you're speaking to those different Personas, you'll be able to know when you're hitting the nail on the head with the right messages that are going to resonate with that audience, when you're starting to see those campaigns deliver those wow results or perhaps. Right. And I know we see this at Oktopost, some of our campaigns are geared more toward, let's say, a social media practitioner, and some are geared more towards a cmo. And sometimes what we will see is that the audiences with the social media practitioners that are usually shared, let's say, within our social team, those will see our. Our impressions will be quite high. But then with the Personas for us, with our executives, their conversions are quite high, which actually I think is interesting. Great content, but like. Right, it's all interesting, but what do you do with the data? So this actually brings me to the next slide. Right. How do you track. How do you present growth? Right. We talked a little bit earlier about. Right. You can kind of get yourself into a pigeonhole sometimes if you show too much data. So, Right. What. What are you bringing to the strategy table or what do you bring into that, you know.
26:15
Jessica Skarzynski
Yeah, meeting. Yeah. So I basically here we can take a look. This is a little bit closer look at some more expanded data from that campaign that we just talked about, the top performing one, the health plan. So on the left, you know, it's. It doesn't look as pretty.
26:30
Jennifer Gutman
It's.
26:30
Jessica Skarzynski
It's not in dashboard format, but, you know, it's kind of, again, because I'm the data nerd, like, I also have spreadsheets that, like, I take the data and I, you know, reorganize it and compare it and things like that. But so what I did was I took a bunch of different dashboards and compared the. Basically it was the six months prior to my joining benefitfocus where social media was kind of in this nebulous state and it was just kind of, you know, there but not really being worked on in such a close way. The first six months I was tracking the data. So after I got there, I kind of took a look at those first six months when we were getting things back up on the ground, you know, setting up campaigns, putting new content out there, and then the most recent six months and what I found for that particular campaign that we were just talking about was an increase in all of the important areas that we track. But it was really, you know, again, trying to find that story in the data. What was it that we did? What was different? Honestly, it was really just because I connected with someone in that area of the business, pulled together a content library for me to just kind of pull from Evergreen, you know, stuff that, you know, had performed well that was on the website that already existed. Maybe there was some new stuff because that, you know, again, it's a smaller area of the business in terms of how much content marketing content is being produced. And I built out just a cadence of regular sharing to our own channels and to the advocacy board and all of that stuff. You know, it kind of took off, but then that kind of leads to the advocacy board, actually. Yeah, if you go back to the previous slide on the right side there. Yes. You'll actually see that. I wanted to highlight an interesting point in that campaign's case where we kind of also talked about this earlier with that one question that came up about how to kind of filter out employee engagement versus external possible prospect engagement. The top three posts from an engagement standpoint in that campaign in that timeframe, they were from members of our advocacy board. The engagements were actually pretty much split, as you can see, with that circle chart 5050 between own and earned, which is something I wanted to bring up on the next slide. But yeah, that was something that I don't think I'd seen ever before with having almost a 50, 50 split like that.
28:49
Jennifer Gutman
So I've actually, when we were going, I like this is, I mean it's impressive and it's rare, but I think what I love about this specific story and kind of back to that question about, right, can you break down, are you speaking to a box of employees, engaging or even amplifying? And right. The answer is no. And the fact that Oktopost can break it down so easily, whether you're looking at top posts by engagement or you're pulling a pie chart, which I love, right, to see side by side, right? You are able to still break down and be able to see what is coming from who and who is right? So you can see is this corporate impact or is this not? And then, right, even if your advocates do have more of an impact or your employees, right. May have more of an impact, that that's still okay, right? For all the reasons we spoke about, employer branding, et cetera, et cetera. But just being able to slice and dice the data how you need, I think puts a lot of social media managers minds at ease. And I will also say, right, because when it comes to tracking and presenting, I think one of the things that can shift and shake our confidence, right. Is we want so badly to prove that what we're doing day in and day out matters. It's a lot of work. I mean, it's crazy. We are a jack of many trades, right? Creating content. You have to have an analytical mind to be able to pull all of this data and understand it and then revamp your strategy. So I'd also like to throw out that if you are indeed thinking about how to present the data to your executive team or to your VP or whoever you report into, you might want to just have a quick sync with them on how they personally like to view data and why I say that, right? So I've had two bosses. One was like no power, no point and one was like I love PowerPoint, right? So it was very interesting. But I think what's nice to know when you kind of level set with, with who you're reporting into in their style, you'll then know how to create these dashboards and Oktopost, whether they're going to be pie charts and you know, aesthetically beautiful to the eye for a PowerPoint presentation or if you want to just email reports out to your executive team or view it in a grid. And that will be helpful for you because then you'll start speaking their language. So I want to add that piece in there. And yeah, it's true.
31:01
Jessica Skarzynski
And before we even get into the next slide, that, actually, that is a good point. Having that conversation with them is so important, not only to talk about, you know, how they want to get their data, but also what do they, what do they see? Social media. I mean, we can go into a whole other, you know, I can go down a rabbit hole on that. But, you know, it really helps to get their perspective on what do they see in social media, what do they hope to get out of it and what do they actually, you know, what, what use do they see? Because if they're, you know, if you're a hammer, everything is a nail. So you want to, you know, kind of get that feeling and see, okay, what is it that, you know, you see being good or bad about social media? And then you can, nine times out of ten, you're going to be able to find the story in that data to help them feel better about that. If there's something that they don't like, you can show them that data and say, okay, it really isn't, you know, something that is just really easily done. Look at all this work that we've done that we put into it and this is what we get out of it. I feel like that's a, Again, it's just another reason, another thing you can do with the data that you're getting. But, but yeah, it's nicely here.
32:07
Jennifer Gutman
Right. It leads us exactly what you just said. Right. What do you hope to get out of it? What is considered successful, what is good? Sometimes they won't know and they will rely on you as a social media manager to help explain and tell them. But I think kind of transitioning to the slide.
32:20
Jessica Skarzynski
Right.
32:21
Jennifer Gutman
Like how social data could even positively impact an advocacy program. Right. It's also how you slice and dice the data. So, Jess, I'll let you just speak towards. Is this the six month, six month look?
32:31
Jessica Skarzynski
Yeah, I believe so.
32:32
Jennifer Gutman
Yeah.
32:32
Jessica Skarzynski
It was basically looking at. So, you know, the involvement of our advocacy board was something that when I first started at Benefitfocus, right around the end of May, beginning of June 2021, that was a big area of focus because it had previously been, you know, kind of, it was there, there was nobody really managing the advocacy board and really working, you know, with their sales enablement team and really kind of of helping those folks that have a really good presence and are really connected with our prospects, with our audience on their own social channels and giving them the tools that they need to kind of take their work to the next step. So we really wanted to kind of have our sales marketing team, those social power users, having them kind of directly plugged into that content was something, it was hands down the easiest and most effective way for us to kind of empower those people that already have that connection, you know, to help them kind of connect with those prospects in an organic and on message way. So when you're looking at May to November, you know, it took a little while, it's a little bit of a ramp up to kind of re engage everybody that was on the board. There were a lot of people that, excuse me, were on the board, that were still listed on the board but actually weren't even with the company anymore. So there was a lot of cleaning, there was a lot of outreach to say, hey, we have these seats on this advocacy board. Who wants to, you know, let's talk about it. I'm, I'm your new person. Like, let's, let's meet. And you know, we really reconnected with that advocacy board and gave them some more tools. Spread the word. We saw that pretty big increase in the number of engagements by channel, which is a really good thing because brand content is great. But when you're a top seller with 5,000 connections on LinkedIn is getting 20% more engagement on a piece of content than the brand is, that's, that's a huge win.
34:24
Jennifer Gutman
Absolutely. And if you think back to earlier in the webinar, right. That, that graph with the circles and we kind of go back to B2B social media. the end of the day, we really are right. It's not about likes, it's about leads. And at the end of the day, we're always trying to think back, right. As we kind of phase out how we're measuring, at the end of the day, how are we going to bring in those leads? Right. This is B2B marketing at its core. So I want to ask, we have a few slides left and I think this is one of the most interesting questions to speak to social media managers. And again, I see a lot of questions coming in. We're going to get to the questions as we near the end. How are you taking actions on your findings and how do you know when you're looking at this data what findings are worth taking actions on?
35:13
Jessica Skarzynski
So I mean, basically it's again, going back to the very beginning. The first thing That I said is really that because content is the foundation of everything we do, we're always looking at our content strategy. So because of that, I like to use the social engagement data to kind of work with our content team. The way that our organization is aligned is really great because I work literally side by side with the content manager and basically where all of that stuff comes from. I work with them, so I work with them so that we can just make smarter decisions about what kind of content to produce and also taking that the next step for what different audiences are we producing, what types of content. So for example, I may see, you know, that in a campaign related to our employer audience, again, thinking in terms of campaigns as audiences, you know, maybe for the employers, thought leadership pieces are going to do better. You know, they have more comments, more likes, more shares. But then with brokers, maybe, for example, they might like video more. We've seen, you know, video goes through the roof there. You know, there's easy ways to see that in Oktopost, so you can break it down by, you know, by the type of content. So if that's the case, if I find that, then I'm definitely going to take that back to the team and say, hey, maybe we should add a few more videos into the mix. You know, let's do an interview with somebody and just split that up into five short little videos and throw that out on social and maybe cut a few of those. Like we had one planned for the other, you know, the employer audience. Maybe let's cut that, we don't need that. Or maybe we'll turn that into a blog post. Maybe we'll turn it into, you know, like I thought, leadership style interview, like actual, you know, print piece, you know, maybe that'll do better. And obviously like you're saving time to focus more on a few more thought leadership pieces. You're. But you're saving your time overall in not wasting time on creating content that's just not going to do very well on social.
37:09
Jennifer Gutman
I love that. What I love about that is the fact that you're using social to understand your audience, to know what assets to create that are going to resonate. And then because you're using Oktopost, you really can see it right in your face, right? And like you said, social media managers, we have full plates, right? I mean, I think there's never enough time in a day to do everything that we need to do. So when you're saving time to be able to know what content to focus on or to create or repurpose or reshare it's just, it's such a time saver. So I think that's a really valid point. Point hopping over to kind of our final. Because it's second almost final slide here. But you've been an Oktopost user now for 365 days. That's amazing. But I'm curious, right, because we're talking about reporting and we're talking about, you know, month over month, year over year. What have you, as Jess, as social media manager, learned over 365 days from your social using Oktopost Social Bi.
38:14
Jessica Skarzynski
I mean, that's again, talk about a loaded question. You know, again, I've only been with benefitfocus for just a little bit more than a year. I've been using Oktopost for that long. The one thing I can say is that the data that I've been able to track has, you know, it comes down to. It's just really given me the insight to, that I need to successfully prepare for this coming year. So basically, like when I got here, Facebook and Instagram posts were really just focused on corporate, corporate culture kind of things. So they were like showcasing the things that they were doing for, you know, they were volunteering around the area or they were, you know, hosting a happy hour. And so the only content that was being put up on Facebook and Instagram were just corporate culture type things, you know, associate updates. It was very, it was very, you know, kind of happy slappy. It wasn't really very focused on like the, you know, the really the drier, like thought leadership or, you know, product marketing type pieces. And when I got into the role, I was like, is there a reason? Like, have we tried it? You know, I look back at the data from before I got there and it was really just, it seemed like there was, was. They just kind of looked at the fact that it was Facebook and Instagram and said, okay, we're not going to bother there. That's not what people are going there for. But just as a kind of a trial and error thing, I said, why don't we just start putting the same content, obviously tailored to the audience and to the platform, but let's put some thought leadership out there. Let's put some content marketing stuff out there. And it actually did much better than we expected. And Instagram, not so much obviously, because Instagram is difficult to drive traffic from Instagram. That's a whole other story. But yeah, on Facebook even in particular, we were like, wow, we didn't expect to see that. So in a year, having a year filled with finding insights like that and having little aha. Moments like that. Just learning that some audiences like some kinds of content more than others. But being able to see our audiences on one platform grow to like more than just the content that we expected them to like. You know, what we can plan to share there now in the future can be expanded in the coming year. And, you know, again, it's just having a whole year. That's just one little example, but it's really been a whole year of learning little things like that about who we're marketing to and who we're putting this content out for. To kind of take a step back and be able to say, oh, we actually. We don't just have to throw a dart at the dartboard and hope that it sticks. We actually have the insights and we have the data that we can use to make sure that it's going to land.
41:01
Jennifer Gutman
My first day at Oktopost, our CEO came over to my desk and had said something to me that has stuck with me. I think that this is really the essence of why we created the Social BI dashboard and reporting and why it's blowing social media out of the water in terms of how we measure B2B. But he had said to me, you can't improve what you cannot measure. Right. And it's like what you were just saying with Facebook, right? How are you going to improve your Facebook channel? How are you going to improve LinkedIn? How are you going to improve your engagements, your impressions, your conversions, your clicks if you can't measure it? And that's really, I would say, the essence of the Social bi.
41:44
Jessica Skarzynski
Oh, yeah. Yep, exactly. I came in basically saying, I don't know what I don't know. But then Oktopost.
41:52
Jennifer Gutman
Yeah.
41:52
Jessica Skarzynski
I mean, obviously it sounds like a, you know, a crazy sales pitch, but it really is true. Oktopost literally was like, that was it like it opened up the door and it was like, oh, my God, now I know everything. You know, you know too much.
42:03
Jennifer Gutman
You know, too much almost. Yeah.
42:04
Jessica Skarzynski
It was like drinking from a fire hose for the first couple weeks, but in a good way.
42:07
Jennifer Gutman
Yeah, there you go. So listen, last question for you. You know, what next, right? Because now you have 365 days of insights and data and all of these little aha moments. What does next year look like? What's next?
42:21
Jessica Skarzynski
Yeah, I mean, ultimately. So, you know, again, when I first started, I say, I've only been here for a year, but I've been here a whole year. You know, when I. When I got here, the idea was, follow kind of a Crawl, walk, run, approach. And ultimately, you know, when we're running, we want to be able to tie what we're doing on social media to a true business impact and actually see that. When I got into the role, we were crawling and we were just getting a cadence up regularly. We were getting things scheduled, we were actually, we were trying new things. We were saying, okay, now that there's someone in the role, it was just a level set, right? Like that was crawling at its finest, getting our advocates re engaged, things like that. Once we started walking, we were working more with the content team, we were creating some more specific kind of campaigns, we were creating more specific the content and then we started to see some growth as a result. So that, you know, now that we're looking at the end of 2022, I can't believe we're already saying that it's almost over, but it is. 2023 is really going to be kind of the next phase where social media is going to kind of really take off. We want to work more closely with sales to really make the case for more action on social media and, you know, really see our results translated directly into revenue terms, which is ultimately what everybody wants to say.
43:40
Jennifer Gutman
Absolutely. And my final question to you because this webinar is reporting with confidence. What do you feel as a social media manager? Right. And this. What gives you, or what should other social media managers be thinking about to if they feel they don't have that confidence yet? What is giving you the confidence to report and come to the table? Even if you have, you know, metrics that maybe the leadership team is kind of raising an eyebrow, what gives you confidence to walk into that room and share. Right. And be excited? I guess a celebration of knowledge of like your role. What gives you that confidence?
44:17
Jessica Skarzynski
Honestly, you know, it's really just basically being able to say, you know, we're, we're, we're actively working towards and we're actively monitoring. We're doing everything that we can. And you know, it sounds kind of, you know, like, like Kumbaya, but it's like we're doing the best that we can with what we have right now. I mean, if the past two to three years has taught anybody anything, it's like you make a plan and it's all going to go out the window. So, you know, the best you can do is you can make a plan and you can keep an eye on that plan and keep an eye on the data of what you are doing at every step of the way and be so that you're able to say we did see things start to turn down a little bit, but we pivoted and we were able to change that content strategy. We know what we're going to do going forward. Instead, you know, again, it's being able to find the story in the data and then basically just kind of say, you know, we, we did what we could and now we're going to take that knowledge and we're going to get even better with it next time.
45:19
Jennifer Gutman
I love it. So I'm going to open up the floor to questions. I can say that there are quite a few. So we don't get to all of the questions. We will certainly, you know, email you and follow up with the questions. So one, I actually have the same questions. I'm going to throw it out first. So in our, our cadence question, we're talking about the cadence, what you're looking at, you mentioned your reshare strategy and this is quite interesting. And we have a guest who's asking, you know, can you define or go into a little bit what, what's the reshare strategy? What is that? That.
45:52
Jessica Skarzynski
So basically, I mean, I wish I had the actual status somewhere. I wish I'd saved it or at least the source that I got it from. Because I remember reading somewhere not too long ago, maybe even sometime last year, that the average post, like the average number of people or, you know, percentage of your audience that sees any given post on any given platform, I think is something like between 1 and 3%. Like that is so my, the thing that I fall back on is not everyone is going to see every single post that you put out. So I'm always of the mind that if something does mildly well. Whereas, like, if it's gotten a few interactions, I'm going to reshare that. I'm going to take that and put that back out on the social calendar. I'm going to reschedule it maybe. Obviously I'm going to tweak the content that I put out with it. You know, maybe I'll. If we have a couple of different graphics.
46:46
Jennifer Gutman
Yeah.
46:47
Jessica Skarzynski
Like again, changing the content that goes with it. But I'm going to share that again because, you know, the chances are that if it performed well with that, you know, little part of your audience, the, you know, however many people that did see it, obviously I know algorithm, algorithm is like a dirty word like in our field because I feel like it gives people so much anxiety and it does to me. But, you know, whatever the algorithm has allowed you to kind of get with that first one, it's worth putting out there again just because you never know who hasn't seen it or you know, has yet to see it.
47:17
Jennifer Gutman
I agree and I think what you just mentioned, it's almost, almost hinting at ab testing social, which is nearly impossible. But that's kind of like going in that direction. Right? Let's test it out again, see if we can get that.
47:28
Jessica Skarzynski
Because you have nothing to lose. You know, that's the one thing I find. I actually have that conversation with a lot of people, especially people at the, you know, at the ELT level where they're always, you know, it's. You have kind of like the techno fear, the social media fear and social media joy where like social media, you know, joy, they're like, let's put it on social media. Let's put everything on social. And it's like, yeah, that's great. Like let's do that. But let's figure out why we want to put it on social. Let's talk about it. But then there's the social media fear. We're like, I don't know if we could, we should put it up again. It's just social media. Like you put it up there and if it doesn't, if it falls flat, it falls flat. We tried, you know, it's always worth it.
48:05
Jennifer Gutman
So listen, I have here, you probably could relate to this hashtag Grant Klein rules. Oh my God, yes.
48:12
Jessica Skarzynski
Who said that?
48:14
Jennifer Gutman
I'm gonna throw Troy Best. I'm just gonna throw that out, but throw the hashtag Grandkind rules. Troy would also like to know, do you have a rough ratio or percentage of posts that are reshares and evergreen content that is promoted again? I can read that again if that doesn't make sense or I could first time ratio.
48:37
Jessica Skarzynski
I honestly, I would say so depend. I'm. Well, the priority is always going to be given to new content, I'll put it that way. So if that, if that helps, if that's answering the question, I would say that it's more. I focus more on new content. Unless it's like a piece that was like, oh my God, it did real numbers that I'll really like. That becomes like a part of the regular cadence then. But yeah, I would say, I mean, I don't know if there's really even a percent. I mean maybe maybe 70, 30, if that. It also depends on. And this is again a symptom of what we're dealing with now. I think in the industry and everywhere in general across the world is basically, you Know, our content team is pretty strapped right now and it also depends on how much content is being produced. You know, how heavily I rely on evergreen content and stuff that's already gone out there. So, yeah, I would say usually it's about a 70, 30 split, but yeah.
49:34
Jennifer Gutman
Nice. There's two more questions all for you, Jess. So, Jess. Sure. Do you have an engagement rate expectation overall or do you set expectations for each campaign?
49:47
Jessica Skarzynski
So that's a really good question and obviously I'm sure that it's one. Everybody on this call has been asked at least a million times by every, every VP or manager that they've reported to. I like to say, again, this is another one of those stats. I have to, I do have to check my own data, actually, now that I'm, I'm bringing it up and putting it out there publicly. I want to say that like the, each channel has its own, but I know that like it's around between 3 and 5% is like good, especially for a brand. And that gets even like that percentage is even better the more, the higher your follower count is. So I like to say that that's kind of what I keep in the back of my head. But I do pay more attention to the campaigns, the campaign level. Like, I set expectations for those and I only compare it to what that campaign, that audience has done in the past because there's some. I mean, I'll give an example from even a previous role. I worked at a publishing company where there were. We managed a whole bunch of different brands and I managed one brand that was for people, like everyday people, and then another brand that was specifically marketed towards nurses. Nurses just don't use social media to read about the nursing profession. Like everyday people use social media to read about being an everyday person. So, you know, I knew that yes, the industry standard is 3 to 5%, but if we got a post that got like a 2%, I would was we were ordering cupcakes like because it was that good to see. So it's basically, yeah, like there's an industry standard. But don't get too bogged down. I would say in those numbers and those stats, it's more important that you're seeing improvement compared to yourself as you go on.
51:46
Jennifer Gutman
I love that last question. And if anyone listening does have more questions, feel free, you know, you can. The next slide put our contact details up. You're welcome to connect with us on LinkedIn. The last question is my leadership team is really pushing us to benchmark against competitors or best practice metrics instead of ourselves. Which is basically what we just said.
52:11
Jessica Skarzynski
Yeah.
52:12
Jennifer Gutman
Year over year and month over month. Have you had to address this? And if so, how do you address this? Right. Because we just, we just spoke about how we need to really look at. At.
52:23
Jessica Skarzynski
There is no industry. Yeah. First of all, my condolences because I know just how difficult that conversation can be to have. Honestly. You know, I, I think what it comes down to is, you know, you can compare against competitors, but it's never going to be an even playing field, you know. Yeah, you can look at things like engagement rate, but, like, it's even more difficult to get, get. Like, I don't even know how some people are getting, like, engagement rate stats from competitive. Like, that's kind of like really, really specific stuff. Like, it's hard to find that data because I would be interested in seeing it, you know, if, if your leadership team is, is asking that I would want them to define exactly what it is that they want to compare what numbers do. They want to see what numbers do they care about and then honestly go back and rewatch what we just talked about and kind of see where, like, there are things that you should care about and then there are things that look good but really don't mean anything. Like follower count. Like, I, I have had that conversation many times, so I would say it's worth having a conversation about what it is particularly that they're trying to find. Because if it's, hey, we want to look at what, we want to look at what our competitors are doing, but we want to see, like, what kind of content they're putting out.
53:45
Jennifer Gutman
Out.
53:46
Jessica Skarzynski
That's great. Look at that. Definitely. Like, look at the content that they're putting out and see maybe just anecdotally, like, oh, is it resonating? Like, did they get a lot of interaction on that, you know, ebook that they published? Maybe. Okay, yeah, like, that's some good stuff. But I would say, I would caution against, and I would say do your best to kind of reset those expectations of your leadership team. And I know it's hard. I know it's. It is really, really difficult. But I think, you know, if you make the case and show off the data that you have compared to what you did have before you, you know, like, look, find the story in your existing data, and that may be a strong enough story to say, hey, look, it is improving. We are getting better. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Yeah, good luck. Because I know that's, that's. I've had that conversation. It's so tough stuff.
54:40
Jennifer Gutman
Amazing. Well, just thank you so much. So again, if you're an Oktopost customer listening in and you, you know, have questions about social bi or reporting, feel free to reach out to your customer success manager. So hashtag Grant Klein rules. Grant Client is one of our customer success managers, works closely with Jess. If you're looking to have a conversation around reporting with confidence anything that you saw here today, please don't hesitate. Feel free to connect with Jess or I on LinkedIn. Our emails are also linked and of course this entire presentation has been recorded and everybody will go ahead and get a recorded session as well as this entire deck. So you'll have all the links and we look forward to having you walk through those social bi dashboards and go to your management team to report with confidence. And we are a community, we are social media managers everywhere and we're here to support you. So please don't be a stranger. Thank you so much.
55:34
Jessica Skarzynski
Thanks guys. Take care.
