Understanding Your Analytics
Let’s talk about social media analytics. There is a of information hiding behind all your social media activity. All of the updates you share, the interactions generated from your followers, comments you replied to and other activities form extremely useful data.
This unique information can benefit your social media marketing strategy in so many ways! This data can help you better understand your audience, show you what your best social networks are and ultimately help you create better content.
So, what are the most important analytics to look at and what do they mean?
Engagement
Engagement is an umbrella term when it comes to social media analytics. This metric encompasses your likes, comments, shares and clicks. The engagement rate is a metric often used to track how actively involved with your content your audience is.
You want to have a high engagement rate; this will indicate your overall audience health!
Impressions
Impressions are how many times a post shows up in someone’s timeline. It doesn’t matter if your post was clicked on or not, it just is the number of times your content was delivered to someone's feed. One person could have multiple impressions for a single piece of content.
Reach
Reach is the total number of people who see your content. Reach measures potential unique viewers a post could have. This number usually includes your follower count plus accounts that share the post’s follower counts. Reach can provide a more accurate number of how many people are actually seeing your content rather than just your followers.
Shares
A shareable post includes anything that is posted on an Instagram feed, including your own! Shares are another way to understand if your content is resonating with your followers. Not only does your follower like the content, but they are sending it to friends to view it as well.
When a user shares content, it reaches new users and allows for the original content creator to gain more followers and ultimately drive more impressions!
Saves
Instagram users can bookmark or “save” content or a post they like for future reference using the save button. It’s a private metric, so only the user who saves the post can see their collection of saves.
Instagram saves are a strong indicator that your content resonates with your audience — they find it valuable enough to save it for later. This is an indication that similar content should be created and shared in the future.
Out of all the social media metrics that are available for you to analyze, the ones listed above are the most essential in understanding how your social media strategy is performing!