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Social media is an integral part of many of your sponsorship agreements, helping them get their brands and products in front of the niche audience you’ve cultivated and getting bonuses through affiliate links. But when you’re crafting a social media strategy for sponsors, how do you accurately value the content you’re creating?
Sure, it doesn’t “cost anything” to post photos and videos and tag your sponsors, but that doesn’t mean that the value you’re providing on Instagram and Facebook (and beyond!) isn’t worth the investment. Also, don’t forget the time you’re taking to create the content, edit, write a caption, and the equipment you need to purchase to get the best shot; like a DSLR camera, tripod, light, microphone, and teleprompter (or hire a photographer or videographer instead).
In this LinkedIn article, Daniel Oyston breaks down the monetary value of Facebook posts based on type and potential ad spend. While you’re maybe not doing paid ads for posts that are exclusively about 1 sponsor or limiting yourself to Facebook, the principles he shares about post type are extremely valuable for monetizing your sponsorship strategy.
(Note: the original article from Daniel was published back in 2016, the screenshots he shares for finding Facebook insights are not available to pages now, you will need to go through either Creator Studio or your Professional Dashboard. Only Creator Studio separates posts by type.)
Understanding Different Post Types
Oyston lays out a case study for one of his marketing partners and evaluates three different kinds of social media posts:
- Link posts
- Image posts
- Video posts (this includes lives and reels)
In your sponsorship strategies, you’re likely focusing on Image and Video posts because they do the best. I don’t recommend posting link posts without something visual like an image or video to go along with it because those don’t perform well anymore.
With Facebook post insights, you can determine the average amount of people that each type of post reaches. Using my analytic post tracking spreadsheet (available here) I keep track of the analytics of each post I publish on both Facebook and Instagram.
As you can see, I categorize by either photo or video, and then track the number of impressions, engagements, video views, and link clicks. I prefer to track impressions instead of reach because it is the number of times your content was viewed. If your impressions are significantly higher than your reach, that means that the same people have viewed your content multiple times and to me, that has higher value, but to each their own.
Once you complete this step for your posts last month, which should take you ~45 minutes, then determine the average amount of impressions per post type. For the Randy Meyer Racing page, it’s:
- Average of all image posts in 2022: 5,874
- Average of all video posts in 2022: 42,016
Determine Click Through Rate
Next, we need to find the Click Through Rate or CTR of your posts. This is the number of times someone clicks on a link you included in a caption, divided by impressions. As you can see in the screenshot below, the analytic tracker, which is free in Driven by Social part 3, calculates that for me to be 2.31% in 2022.
On average, 2.31% of people that see one of the Randy Meyer Racing posts on Facebook (with a link in it) will click on it. This means around 136 will click on a link in an image post and 971 will click on a link in a video post. We will talk about ways to get CTR up in part 2 of this series.
Valuating your content production will help sponsors know exactly what they’re getting when they partner with you. Facebook Creator Studio makes it easy to discover how each of your posts performs — but what kinds of posts are best? And how do you continue to improve your click through rates and reach across the board to make more money?
