Analytics can be overwhelming. Numbers? Tables?? Graphs??? If you’re not usually an analytics person, it can be intimidating and (dare I say) boring to look at. But, unfortunately for those of us who are better at picking out color schemes than dissecting an Excel spreadsheet, it is essential to keep an eye on your numbers.
Thankfully, once you know what the different metrics mean and where to find them, it’s easier than you’d think to track your analytics.
Before anything else, it’s important to know the top metrics to pay attention to and what they mean. This will help determine what, if anything, you need to adjust to achieve your goals.
Top Metrics To Monitor
Engagement
People engage with your account by liking, commenting, or sharing your content. Engagement is one of the easiest metrics to measure because it is just each individual interaction with your content. As a general rule, you can assume that the content that gets the most engagement is what people like the best, and the content that gets fewer interactions isn’t as applicable to your audience.
There will always be some variance in how many likes different posts get, but if one specific style or topic continually performs worse or better than others, it will give you a good idea of what your followers want to see more (or less) of. That being said, it’s better to post something rather than nothing, even if it doesn’t perform as well. The best practice is take your audience’s preferences into consideration, but don’t stop posting something due to low engagement without replacing it with something else. With social media, quantity and quality are both important.
Reach & Impressions
Reach refers to the total number of people your content or account has reached. This means each time someone sees your content, it’s counted into the reach total (even if they don’t interact with it). That is why your reach will always be higher than your engagement metrics, usually by a significant amount. While it’s unthinkable that someone would look at your post without liking it (the audacity!), it does happen– but that doesn’t mean your content didn’t leave a good impression!
Speaking of impressions, the impressions metric is similar to reach but represents the total amount of times your content has been viewed. So, if your post reaches 10 people, and each person sees your post 5 times, you’d have 50 total impressions.
Your reach and impressions generally correlate with how many followers you have, but there are times when a post will go “viral” and will exceed your follower amount by a large margin. While it’s exciting when that happens, it’s important to remember that even though the rest of your content analytics might look bad in comparison, it doesn’t mean the rest of your content is worse.
Followers
You’re probably familiar with seeing how many people follow your account, but when you dive into the analytics side of your accounts, you can see how much your total follower account has changed over time. You can also see if and when people are unfollowing you, which can be helpful to reference. If you post a picture promoting something controversial and you lose 50 followers that night, you can reasonably assume that your audience doesn’t want to see you posting about whatever it was. That doesn’t necessarily mean you shouldn’t post what you want, since it is your account. But it does give you something to think about going forward.
Similarly, if you notice that you gain followers each time you post an Instagram reel of the office dog, you can assume that people are following you to see more of Sparkles the Weiner Dog. You may want to consider giving him a raise for carrying your social media success on his very, very small back.
How to Monitor Your Analytics
For most social media platforms, you can find your analytics under your account details. Once you’re there, it should open to (or give you the option to view) an overview of your analytics, which will give you the metrics mentioned above. There are quite a few intimidating sections and numbers being thrown at you, so just remember which ones you’re there to see.
How you track the data is up to you, but it could be as little as taking a peek at the previous month’s metrics for your own reference, or as much as downloading the metric spreadsheets and compiling them into a robust report. However you choose to track your analytics, we recommend doing so at the beginning or end of each month. This allows you to get a good idea of how your content is performing on average, without the data being overly skewed by one post that performs outside the normal range. This also allows you to use the data for your upcoming month’s social plan, which we also highly recommend putting into place!
Finally, a Sales Pitch
You can certainly monitor and track your own social media analytics. Or… you can have us do it for you. Just because you can do hard things, doesn’t mean you necessarily have the time to dig into the data. We can build you a personalized social media strategy, create and schedule out content in advance, monitor your analytics, and adjust your strategy accordingly so that your content goes further and performs better without you having to put in hours that you could be spending doing the things you want to be doing.
You can do it on your own, but we’re here to help.
If you want to learn more about our Social Media Management, book a no-strings-attached call today!
Otherwise, happy analyzing!
