I have been immersed in social media since its early days. I’ve observed its transformation from a platform where users would “poke” friends and share #TBT images to a vital force that shapes global culture. The impact of social media on worldwide events and national elections underscores its profound integration into our society.
It’s almost unbelievable to think about a time when it was seen as revolutionary for brands to establish an online social presence. Today, it’s essential. On social platforms, brands boost sales, shape perceptions about their products and companies, and even create multi-million dollar enterprises from scratch.
While the landscape of social media has significantly transformed throughout my career, social teams still often feel overlooked. Even though social data stands as one of the most easily accessible and real-time consumer insight sources available today, many teams are uncertain about how (or lack the resources) to align social initiatives with company objectives.
By enabling teams to master not only the creativity but also the methodology behind social data narratives, brands can enhance long-term visibility, build pipelines, and evolve products. Assist your social team in articulating their insights in a manner that resonates with executives, board members, and product teams to make this valuable data prominent and actionable.
This article details how the Sprout social media team extracts significant business outcomes from social data and what marketing leaders can do to effectively bridge the communication gap with their social teams.
Do executives truly place trust in social teams?
As indicated by The 2025 Sprout Social Index™, 41% of social marketers express that their biggest concern is a lack of trust from company leadership regarding their ability to publish high-performing content. This is intriguing since more than half of marketing leaders affirm that executives fully trust their social teams—this figure rises to 74% among the executives themselves.
Social media professionals question whether leadership is genuinely committed when they encounter difficulty in obtaining resources and approvals, even after meeting or exceeding KPIs. According to the Index, 92% of leaders expected their teams to fulfill their annual objectives by the end of 2024.
Why is trust in social teams lacking? Leaders and teams are often misaligned regarding how much social content should reflect the organization’s priorities.
Align corporate objectives with creativity and performance
Social teams are inherently motivated to produce the most effective content possible. Consider the latest trending formats and memes. Often, this content is broadly appealing but fails to emphasize the priorities that leaders prioritize.
When a coherent connection between social content and an executive’s goals is absent, resources such as budget or personnel may be shifted to other teams that have a more direct influence on company growth. Leaders have a unique opportunity to sync essential initiatives with social content and campaigns—this alignment provides the social team with crucial direction and demonstrates executives’ dedication to shared objectives.
For instance, senior leaders empowered my team to develop a series that displays how Sprout marketers utilize our platform to impact business goals and social strategies. We anticipated that this would not yield the same results as posts focused on trends, so we pushed ourselves to infuse a sense of fun and internet-savvy culture into the content.
The outcome was unexpected, as these meme-themed posts and short talking head videos actually garnered two to three times more engagement than our usual posts.
Executives should encourage social teams to meet business needs, but social teams equally deserve the freedom to creatively approach content—both can coexist. Does your social team comprehend where leaders’ attention lies? If they do not, communicate this to them. While that doesn’t imply dictating their full content agenda, it does entail guiding content themes and inviting the social team into strategic discussions.
Leverage appropriate data to garner additional resources
Even if social content aligns with company goals, that does not ensure your performance metrics resonate with the KPIs that leaders value. Many social marketers present data like impressions or production volumes to executives, only to be met with lukewarm responses.
The Index notes that leaders prefer teams to evaluate success using metrics such as engagement, audience growth, and social interaction volume. Clearly communicate your desired KPIs to your team and offer constructive feedback on how they can enhance their reporting dashboards and executive summaries. Assist your team in realizing that when they seek more personnel or resources, they need to substantiate their requests with compelling data.
Moreover, there’s potential for social teams and executives to extend their focus beyond conventional performance metrics and concentrate on more valuable data, such as audience insights obtained from social listening, competitive analysis, and direct connections to pipeline development. Accomplishing this effectively demands stronger collaboration and suitable tools.
How Sprout fostered alignment between our social and leadership teams
The Index discovered that what social marketers most wish their executives understood is the necessity for greater collaboration across departments. Even at Sprout Social—where we embrace the power of social data—leveraging sophisticated social insights required more concerted collaboration across our marketing function.
Here are three steps we implemented to unearth insights meaningful to our CMO, board members, and our product team, as well as actionable measures you can adopt to eliminate communication hurdles.
1. Achieve executive consensus on objectives
Rushing into reporting without a clear understanding of what you’re aiming to measure can lead to ineffective narratives. It’s essential to start with your objectives and work backwards. At Sprout, our initial step involved our CMO and me directing our team to redefine our reporting approach in line with Sprout’s key business priorities while demonstrating return on investment.
We needed to shift away from reporting on excessive or irrelevant metrics and instead focus on linking organic social content to metrics further along the sales funnel. We envisioned a reporting system that allowed us to utilize our tools to capture multi-touch attribution—from top-of-funnel engagement and reach figures down to demand creation.
We prioritized identifying the content that drives pipeline revenue, which aided us in isolating key metrics like Earned Media Value (EMV), Cost Per Lead (CPL), and Leads Generated.
With backing and co-creation from executives, we presented this initiative to other marketing teams. An executive sponsor ensured that this endeavor was prioritized within their agenda.
2. Develop meaningful reporting routines
Working in partnership with other marketing functions is the only way to fully grasp the value of social. Most consumers interact with your brand multiple times before making a purchase or signing up for a webinar. By uniting teams across marketing, including operations, SEO, and field and events, we were able to reassess the customer journey and create measurement systems that served all teams well.
We collaborated with marketing analytics to connect our social initiatives directly to revenue through Sprout’s partnership with Salesforce. Diligent UTM tagging made multi-touch attribution feasible, allowing us to track the influence of social media, influencer marketing, and employee advocacy on leads through the customer journey and sales tunnel. This newly established multi-touch attribution model revealed an astounding 5,800% rise in pipeline impact.
This integration enables us to view a more comprehensive picture of the effects of organic social media across diverse channels and functions. By forming a council of marketing stakeholders, we have paved the way for heightened interest in social performance and made these vital insights more accessible.
3. Refine data storytelling
After we extract data using our platform, it’s time to infuse metrics with meaning through captivating data storytelling. We craft a narrative that conveys the importance of social media and its impact on the company as a whole.
We consolidate our key metrics linked to business value along with competitive context, ensuring leadership recognizes how we compare to industry counterparts. Your team can even utilize the executive social media scorecard that our social team provides to our CMO monthly.
This scalable approach allows us to consistently deliver valuable insights not just to our CMO, but also to the broader marketing organization, the entire Executive Leadership Team, board members, and the product team.
Through illustrating the impact of our strategy, we’ve gained extra funding for team expansion, broadened our influencer marketing initiatives, and obtained support for Sprout’s brand activation at Design Miami 2024. Achievements like these rely heavily on a robust comprehension of our data.
Utilize relevant social data to narrow the trust divide
Bridging the communication void between executives and social teams transcends mere data—it necessitates alignment, collaboration, and effective storytelling. By applying the strategies discussed here, you can convert social media insights into a formidable tool that propels business growth and nurtures trust within your organization.
For additional insights on equipping your social team to craft impactful data narratives, refer to The 2025 Sprout Social Index™.
The article How to close the communication gap between executives and social teams first appeared on Sprout Social.
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