A Guide To Understanding Your Social Media Analytics

If you create content and don’t take your analytics seriously, you’re hurting yourself.

You can be amazing at it but you could grow so much more if you understood the data behind it.

Let’s decode the metrics that matter and transform your content strategy from pure guess to precision.

Followers VS Growth

Forget follower numbers as a vanity metric. Let’s look at it as a growth one.

Your follower count is like the speedometer on a car - it tells you your current speed and how fast you’re accelerating. You can take a picture of how fast you’re going OR you can compare it with how fast your competitors are going and see if you should put your feet on the pedal and accelerate.

Imagine this: you have 1,000 followers and your competitor has 2,000. It may seem they are ahead, but if you gained 200 followers last week and they only gained 100, your growth is better than theirs.

Focus on that.

Reach VS Impressions

To understand the impact of your content you need to know the difference between reach and impression.

Reach: Total number of unique individuals who saw your content.

Impression: How many times your content was viewed (can include repeated views from the same individual).

Focus on reach. Your goal is to touch more unique viewers. High reach means your content is spreading, which means a new audience and that means new followers and a bigger impact.

Engagement Rate

This is the heart of your content analysis. It’s how you know how you’re performing and if your audience likes the content. The percentage can be calculated in three ways:

1. To compare different accounts in the same platform:

   (Likes+Comments+Shares) / Total Followers * 100

2. To compare the same account on different platforms:

   (Likes+Comments+Shares) / Post Impressions * 100

3. To improve the content performance on one platform:

   (Likes+Comments+Shares) / Reach * 100

Depending on your goal you need to calculate this rate in different ways, and should always keep an eye on the three, across all the platforms you use, and compare it against your competitors.

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

CTR is the percentage of people who saw your post and clicked on the link. This is a very important metric to improve your call to action and to understand how persuasive you are in your message.

For example, if your post has 1000 views and 100 click on the link, that’s a 10% CTR.

Conversion Rate

One of the most important metrics, it tracks how many people took action and converted after engaging with your content.

For example, from the 100 clicks of the CTR example, if 25 end up signing up for a newsletter, downloading something, or whatever action you want them to take, then your conversion rate is 25%.

Now please, take action

Here’s a quick checklist to make sure you’re ready to take action. Because one thing is reading, another is starting to implement ;)

1. Identify the key metrics you want to track: From these and more, which are the important metrics for you and your goals? Consider having trend analysis in your regular data check.

2. Set up better analytics tools: Besides the standard analytics from the platforms, do you have tracking on your website and landing pages? Can you know the common sentiment from comments across all your profiles and posts without spending hours reading everything?

3. Adapt content based on data: Use the insights gained from the tracking and analysis to improve your content. Here is where you execute the feedback you’re getting (from your posts and from what is trending). You can do this every 2-3 days or 2-3 weeks, depending on how much content you create, but you need to have quite some data to be able to take insights from it.

4. Repeat point 3. But never forget to be creative and not lose yourself only in the numbers.

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That’s all for today, I hope you enjoyed it!

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