Analytics explain how your social media content is performing. Does your audience like it? What post made them think about you longer? What generated action? Etc. They are an extremely powerful tool…if you know how sift through the info correctly.
Each platform has different terminology for their analytics so let’s jump back to 3rd grade and start off with a quick vocab lesson.
Analytics Vocab
- Algorithm: Algorithms are used in social media as a way to deliver to content to the user. News feeds use algorithms to determine the content to show you based on your interests and activity, not in chronological order. This applies to Facebook and Instagram. Twitter allows for chronological order.
- Reach: Reach is the total number of people who see your content.
- Impressions: Impressions are the number of times your content is displayed. So if 100 individuals saw your content twice, you would have 200 impressions.
- Engagement: Engagement is actions taken on your content such as likes, shares, comments, and saves.
- Followers: This is the number of individuals who have clicked to see your content in the future. This can get confusing because there are both “page likes” and “page follows” on Facebook. Someone might “like” your page, but not follow you, and vice versa. So follows are more important than likes. Facebook is the only platform that uses both likes and follows.
- Friends/Connections: On personal Facebook pages, you have “friends.” On LinkedIn, you have “connections.” These are not applicable to business pages.
- Profile Visits/Page Views: These metrics are the number of times people clicked through to your profile/page.
- Website Clicks: This is the number of times your website was clicked. On Instagram, this is the link in your bio. On Facebook, this is the call-to-action button at the top of your page.
- Story Reach: This is the number of individuals who watched your story, whether it was one second or more.
- Saves: This is the number of times an individual clicked the save button on your post.
Now with all of that information, you’re probably wondering about which metrics are most important. Previously, likes/follows were the most important metric because the more people who follow you, the more people see your content, right? Well, not so much.
Reach vs. Likes
If your page has 6,000 followers but you only get about 100 likes on your posts, it’s easy to think you’re doing something wrong. Recent stats show that about 6% of your audience actually sees your posts, meaning 94% of your audience didn’t even have the chance to do so. Before you get discouraged by the number of likes on your post, take reach into account.
If you have 6,000 follows, but your post had a reach of 500 people, that means 8.3% of your audience actually saw your post. Out of those 500 people, you got 100 likes. That would mean 20% of the people who actually saw your post gave it a “like.” Suddenly those 100 likes are looking a lot better than they did before!
Engagement & the Algorithm
If any social media platform does not display in chronological order, that means there is an algorithm that decides what content to show you based on your activity. The more people like, comment, share, and save your posts, the more likely they are to see your posts in the future. That’s why it’s important to have a clear call-to-action, telling your audience what to do. If you are struggling to get any engagement, it’s likely due to poor copywriting.
Keep Your Goal in Mind
It’s hard to definitively say what analytics you and your business should care about because it can be different for everyone. If you want to drive website traffic, you’ll want to focus on website clicks and profile visits. If you want brand awareness, focus on reach. Want to generate new leads? Focus on engaged followers.
Are you still not quite sure how to read an analytics report or what goals you should be aiming for? Contact me and I’m happy to talk you through it one-on-one.