Social media insights are your eyes and without them you are posting blind! Tracking and reviewing your insights at the end of the month allows you to understand what’s working and what’s not. This is vital to help you move forward, to grow, build and improve, and helps you to plan your upcoming marketing activities and campaigns accordingly.
What do I need to measure?
There are so many metrics, sometimes it’s hard to know where to start. Below are a few key metrics and what they mean.
Followers
Followers is sometimes called a vanity metric, especially when measure purely as a number on its own. Although we want to grow out audience on social media, having an engaged, relevant audience of 300 is much more valuable than 1,000 followers who are completely irrelevant to your business. So, take with a pinch of salt, but generally speaking we want to grow our audience/followers, so still need to track this number.
Reach
Reach is the number of people who have seen your post, page or story in a specified time frame. This gives us an idea of how many people your posts or page are being displayed to. You will notice that this number is usually significantly lower than the number of followers you have, so remember that not all your followers will see all of your content and posts.
The total reach in a time period will only count a person once. So, make sure you don’t add two time periods together for a total reach as this may duplicate some people and give you a false reading. Most social media platforms will allow you to edit the time frame which is a better way to gain the number.
Impressions
Impressions is the number of times your post, page or story has been displayed, and it may be displayed to one person more than once. This number will be higher than reach, but doesn’t necessarily give us the best understanding of the number of people who are viewing your content, use reach for that.
This metric does just help us to understand if people are viewing multiple times and gives us a more in-depth picture to our report.
Engagement
The key metric that everyone is after! Engagement on your post, page or story is when an action has been taken. This could be someone clicking ‘read more’, it could be a like, save, share or comment. These are all actions. Without it broken down it is quite a vague metric, but an important one nevertheless.
We want people to engage with our posts as this shows to the social media platform, whether that’s Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn or Twitter, that your post or your page contains interesting and valuable content. It’s made someone stop scrolling and pay attention, so it should show it to more people! Just what we want!
What does it all mean?
Once you have tracked the above metrics and have some data to analyse, next we need to look at the story it tells us. The collective story paints a picture of how individual users or a group of users interact with your page, posts and stories. This picture gives you an idea of what people have been up to when they interact with your page and absorb your content, which will guide you as you move forward.
How granular do I go?
Knowing how deep to look into the data comes down to you and the questions you have around the success of your content. If there is something very specific that you are trying to find out then you can look deep into the data, in a granular aspect, even down to each user’s journey. Usually an overview of the above metrics will give you a good understanding of how your page, posts and stories are performing though.
That’s all well and good, but what does it mean for ME?
Without the data and insights into your social media, you are posting blind! These metrics are your eyes and help you understand how people are viewing your posts and content that you’re putting out, how they’re interacting with it and what they like.
On the flip side, it also gives you an idea of what content they didn’t like or notice so you can adapt your posts to include more of what they did like.
That doesn’t mean to say if a post performed poorly compared to some others that you never post that content again! Quite the opposite! It might be important information you’re posting about but the format of it or how it is displayed doesn’t catch the followers’ eyes. This is where we have to work on the content and come up with creative ways to deliver it.
Perhaps the post that didn’t perform well was an image, whereas next time you could try posting a similar post but with a video. Or maybe the post was a link to your website with the preview image from the link, next time you could try using an image with a shortened link in the text of the post.
To conclude, use the data and insights as your eyes, your vision into how your page, posts and stories are performing. Use this vision to guide you as you move forward to grow your social media account and serve more useful, interesting content for your audience.
If you have any questions or would like to discuss anything in more depth as there is so much involved in this topic, then do get in touch.
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