How to Understand Social Media Analytics
Most social media outlets provide in-platform insights that track engagement with daily, weekly, and monthly reports on business accounts. Being able to track data helps show value to clients and set a benchmark for future success.
Each month we take a good look at each client's analytics and pull together a monthly in-depth report. Analytics are so important to social media and without them we wouldn't know where each client stands. We want to be sure each platform, whether it be Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, is doing well. How a post performs is important to us and tells us what is or is not working for each client. When our numbers are good we need to take a look at what is working and why our engagement has increased. When our numbers are low we need to take that same look at each post and pin-point what went wrong that month. Here are a few ways we track metrics throughout the month:
Engagement: This shows the number of times people have engaged with a post through a like, comment, or share.
Reach: This shows how many people are reached from each post even if they did not engage with the post.
Organic Reach: The number of people that see a post without any paid distribution.
Paid Reach: The number of people who have seen a paid advertisement through a post. When a client chooses to pay to promote a post, they have the choice of where they would like the post to be promoted geographically as well as what age range they would like to target.
Follower Growth: Each month we keep a count of the number of followers a client has. That way we are able to look at how much the account is gaining each month by using the formula ‘New followers - Old followers ÷ Old followers = % change’ from month to month.
We also look at the top 5 posts that perform best each month. When we look at those posts, we ask ourselves why they did so well. Was the caption funny? Was the picture different from normal posts? What time did we post? We try to figure out the best way to re-implement those efforts in our future posts.
To some these may just be numbers, but to us they are much more. Each number plays a role in how our accounts are doing and shows us what we need to continue to do or change.
