Data and Social Media Effectivness

Because sometimes the numbers do lie

Hello! Last week I had the opportunity to speak at Five Q’s Digital Ministry Conference in Dallas. I was asked to speak on the topic: “Using Data to Drive Your Ministry’s Social Media Effectiveness.”

Below is the manuscript I worked off of as I spoke. I didn’t say all of this word-for-word, but it was my reference material throughout my talk, slide cues and all.

Speaking of which, here is a link to my slide deck. Not a ton of additional material there, but it may be helpful for understanding a couple of sections below.

I hope this is helpful for you!

-Chris

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Before we talk about what steps to take in the present so that we might be more effective in the future, we need to look to the past for a couple of minutes.

The Pivot to Video That Wasn’t [SLIDE]

When Facebook Live launched around the end of 2015 and the beginning of 2016, I was skeptical of how successful it would really be. At the time I was overseeing the blogs and social media of three of Lifeway’s six vice presidents, helping positioning them on the internet as thought leaders and subject matter experts in their varied areas of expertise. It was my first job—I was only a couple of years into my career at that point—and naturally the executives were interested in taking advantage of this new Facebook feature.

But like I said, I was skeptical. I remember sitting in many digital content strategy meetings saying things like, “Look at how much streaming is taking off. Look at people cutting the cord for cable TV. Live content is dying. On-demand content is exploding. There’s no way Facebook Live will work!”

Well I was wrong. …Or at least it appeared I was wrong.

What I didn’t think about was Facebook’s ability to promote its new feature and, effectively, force it to work by making sure Facebook Live content was constantly at the top of news feeds and vomiting notifications into people’s web browsers and smartphone apps whenever someone went live.

Quick little pro tip for free: When a social media company creates a shiny new feature they want to succeed, it’s generally best to give some attention to that shiny new feature, because they’re going to work really hard to make that feature succeed—and reward the creators who use that feature.

So we created a ton of Facebook Live content for a solid two years. One of the Facebook pages I was managing only had something like 10,000 likes/follows on it, but our Facebook Live videos were regularly being viewed by 40-60,000 people.

It was bananas. The authors and executives I was working with at the time couldn’t get enough of Facebook Live. I was bouncing around the office recording Facebook Lives almost every day, it felt like. And I had never created video content before. Had no idea what I was doing. But I bought a tripod and a mic and we were making it work.

This phenomenon was colloquially called “the pivot to video.”

Several major media companies around the world fired journalists in droves because of this shift.

Advertising agencies and marketing departments from coast-to-coast dumped truckloads of money into Facebook video as it was clearly garnering unmatched attention on the internet.

From about 2015 through 2017—which is only two years but in the realm of digital content feels like a decade—Facebook Live and Facebook video were at the top of everyone’s digital media content strategies. Countless man hours and dollars were spent on this pivot to video.

Why? Because the data was telling us that it was working.

The problem is, Facebook was lying and the data was wrong.

While there had been rumblings as early as 2016 that the Facebook video metrics were being artificially inflated (because of some reporting by the Wall Street Journal), a 2018 lawsuit by a group of small advertising agencies revealed that the Facebook video metrics were inflated by anywhere from 150% TO 900%!

Facebook settled the lawsuit for $40 million dollars, made that money back in 12 hours, and went on finding other ways to make a profit at the expense of its users well-being. But that’s another talk for another time.

What do we need to take from this particular instance of Facebook’s duplicity?

You cannot always trust social media metrics to tell you the truth…or even the full story.

And the best way to use data to drive your ministry’s social media effectiveness is to use social media to migrate your audience away from social media.

So What Do We Do? [SLIDE]

Our job as content creators and social media managers is to use data to learn about the needs and interests of our audiences so that we can figure out how to best serve them away from the muddy waters of social media.

We turn data into depth.

And social media, in my experience, only allows for a relatively shallow depth-of-relationship with an audience. Your relationship with your audience will improve the further away you move it from social media platforms.

The topic I was asked to address with you all today is: “Using data to drive your ministry’s social media effectiveness,” and in order to use data to make your social media efforts more effective, you must use your data to evacuate social media and create true depth-of-relationship, true intimacy, if you will, with your audience.

Numbers are no good if our interaction with those numbers does not lead us into a deeper relationship with our audience.

But how do we do that?

5 Steps to Turn Data Into Depth [SLIDE]

Here are five steps that explain, in maybe an oversimplified way, how we turn data into depth. Of course it isn’t always this clean, but in all of my roles and consulting work over the years, this is generally the flow of how data leads to depth.

So first, we need to:

1. Pay attention to the data that matters. [SLIDE]

There’s a temptation in social media management, and I think the marketing world in general, to get caught up in vanity metrics and big numbers that don’t necessarily serve as the most helpful indicators of audience engagement and interest with a brand or ministry.

If we want to use data to make our ministries’ social media work more effective, and lead to deeper relationships with our audiences, we need to pay attention to the data that actually matters.

[COLUMNS SLIDE]

Here’s a brief slide with just a handful of the most common data I’ve seen people track over the years. We don’t have a ton of time to break down each of these.

Feel free to ask me about them afterward. But those in the left column are the data you generally want to track, and those in the right column are data points that aren’t necessarily worthless, but should be considered much less important and impactful than those on the left.

I don’t know what each one of you do, or what your time management looks like in a given week, but I know that when I have been actively tracking social media metrics in my various roles over the years, I have never had enough time to track and crunch all of the numbers that are at my disposal.

So that’s why I think it’s important for us to rightly prioritize the numbers that we do pay attention to. It’s not that those metrics in the right column are totally useless, it’s just that if you likely have a limited amount of time to track and analyze data, those are the categories that merit less attention than those on the left.

Next, after we’ve sifted through all of the data available and picked out the pieces that are most important, you need to:

2. Discern what your data says about your audience. [SLIDE]

Now that you’re hopefully paying attention to the most useful social media metrics, it’s time to turn that data into actionable information.

What is even the point of tracking data on social media or any other online platform? Is it just to watch the numbers go up, present them to your boss, and hope you finally get that raise you’ve been pining for?

Hopefully not.

We track data on our digital content efforts because data is, at its core, communication.

When we post on social media as individual content creators or as representatives of a larger organization or ministry, we are shouting into the void of the internet.

Data is the void shouting back at us (sometimes, unfortunately, literally shouting).

Outside of literal comments or direct messages, the data we track on our social media content is the way we hear from our audience. You probably understand what I’m saying here, even if you haven’t thought about it exactly in this way.

But say you’re a ministry that wants to help Christians be better parents. Over the course of the last few weeks, you’ve posted content about praying for children, discipling children, and having difficult conversations with children.

You’re a good social media manager, so you’re tracking the right data, and you’re recognizing that the engagement and watch time on all of your content about discipline is significantly higher than those metrics on the other kinds of content.

This is your audience talking to you, so you better listen!

Your audience is saying to you: “We need help disciplining our kids in a way that reflects the heart of Christ. Help us do this! We need more content about this!”

Of course it’s important to not over-index on data points like this. There could be other reasons that content popped off. It doesn't mean your ministry should only focus on content around the topic of disciplining children, but you should take it as a message from your audience about who they are and what their needs are.

We do not track data for data’s sake. We track data to better serve our audiences.

So after you’ve taken the step of listening to the void shouting back, what do you do with that information?

3. Make content your audience actually wants. [SLIDE]

This might sound weird to say, or overly obvious, but let me tell you that—at least in my experience—creating content your audience wants is an often-overlooked principle of effective social media content strategies.

Why is this often overlooked?

It is a temptation in any kind of marketing and communications discipline, including social media, to assume your audience has the same priorities you do when it comes to your ministry or brand.

When I was overseeing the social media operation at Lifeway, multiple times per day I had product managers emailing me asking me to post about their new product or event on the main Lifeway social media handles as soon as possible to announce the new offerings to our audience.

I didn’t do it for a number of reasons, as I’m sure you can imagine, but at the front of my mind was, “Our social media audience doesn’t care about our new product as much as you care about our new product!”

This applies to you in some way, I’m sure. We always need to be careful to use social media in ways that tap into the needs and interests of our audience, understanding that sometimes our priorities need to take a backseat to that.

The most effective social media content strategies I have seen create content at the intersection of these three circles. [VENN DIAGRAM SLIDE]

Of course sometimes you need to do a hard sell and announce some big new product or initiative that may not be super interesting to your whole audience. No doubt.

But the vast majority of your social media content should be more audience-centric than ministry-centric, and the way you know how to make audience-centric content is by—refer to steps 1 and 2—1) paying attention to data that matters and 2) discerning what that data says about your audience.

By following steps 1 through 3, I think you can start to build some real momentum on your social media channels (of course there are other factors we haven’t talked about here, like appeasing algorithms and other such details).

But then, once you stock the pond with fish on social media, you need to fish them out of the social media pond and take your relationship with your audience elsewhere. Which is my next point.

4. Shepherd your audience away from social media. [SLIDE]

After you have started to build a sizable, engaged audience on any social media platform, or even while you’re building that audience, you should start working to shepherd that audience into a relationship with you that is unencumbered by the entanglements of social media platforms.

If you’ve been in the social media game for any amount of time, you know that once upon a time on Facebook, your ministry’s page could expect an organic reach rate of roughly 20% on average—this would have been around 2014 and earlier. That’s not awful, but it’s not great.

These days, the average organic reach rate for most Facebook pages hovers around 1%. That means that in 2014, if you had a Facebook following of 1000 people for your ministry, you could expect to reach probably 200 of those people on any given piece of content.

Today that Facebook page with 1000 followers will organically reach 10 followers with any given piece of content. And it’s not like we all just got bad at making content all of a sudden.

We don’t need to get into all of the reasons this shift happened, mostly it’s because Facebook decided to turn on the money machine, but I think this shift is instructive:

If you want to develop a deep relationship with 100% of the people who are interested in your ministry, you cannot be beholden to Meta or any other social media company. Otherwise you will be stuck paying for permission to reach 99% of the people who have opted-in to following you on social media.

So what do you do? How do you do that?

There are a lot of different ways to shepherd your audience off of social media and into other forms of owned communication platforms. More than I can explore in the little time I have left.

But, to put it simply, you should always be working to convert your social media audiences into an email audience, as your email audiences are not subject to the whims and whimsy of social media platforms, their algorithms, and their business interests.

Getting your social media audience onto email lists is vital for effective digital content ministry. If you aren’t doing it now, start.

Once you shepherd your audience away from social media, you will have a bit more freedom to communicate, which allows you to move to the final step of our little progression this morning:

5. Create depth on other platforms. [SLIDE]

This is really the simplest of the five steps, and our time is running short, so I’ll keep it brief.

By moving your relationship with your audience to other platforms whether online or offline—email, direct mail, group chats, or anywhere else—you gain the opportunity to deepen your relationship with your audience because your relationship will not be mediated by social media algorithms and their business interests.

Perhaps you want to develop donors. Maybe you just want to provide content resources like articles or podcasts or other things. All of these are deeper forms of relationship with an audience than social media supports.

Of course you can try to create depth-of-relationship on social media, but refer back to the abysmal organic reach rates I mentioned before. You’re gunna pay for it.

Once you have your audience somewhere like an email list, it becomes much easier to interact with them and not worry about whether or not they are receiving all of the communication you want to send to them.

On Data [TITLE/EMAIL SLIDE]

Let me just leave you with a few thoughts on data as we wrap up here, okay? Some of this I have already said, some of it I haven’t.

Data is great. We should all love data. But we should be careful to recognize that data doesn’t always tell the full story.

If I had the time, I could provide you with a bunch of examples of “social media effectiveness” that would have never looked impressive on a monthly analytics report.

Data doesn’t tell the full story of social media effectiveness because social media is about interacting with people, and relationships don’t fit into spreadsheets as often as some of us may like.

We use data well as content creators and social media managers when we use it to better understand and serve our audiences.

Data is not an end in itself. Data is a means to developing a deeper relationship with the people we hope to serve.

Thank you.