A Beginners Guide to Social Media Analytics

Over the past several years social media has become a critical tool for businesses to create brand awareness, increase customer engagement, and even prospect with potential clients. So, like any savvy business owner you likely set up your profiles, you made a few posts, you may have even purchased an ad or two...but there’s an elephant in the room that you’re ignoring even though you know you shouldn’t be: analytics. 

Social media analytics can be overwhelming. 

So much so that it can be tempting to just ignore them, and continue posting on instinct or convenience or some combination of the two. Ignorance is bliss, right? 

With each platform offering hundreds of pieces of data related to the content that you’re posting, that dashboard of information can feel like it’s in another language. There are a few key figures, consistent across all platforms to take note of, to begin to dip your toe into the world of analytics and take advantage of this free information provided to you. 

In this blog post, we’ll be highlighting 3 social media analytics, with examples directly from the commonsku social accounts, that you can start tracking today to become content conscious across your platforms and use to begin building your online presence. 

Engagement Rate 

The engagement rate is the holy grail of analytic figures that can give you insight into the overall health of your presence on a particular platform in a single percentage.

In short, your engagement rate is the amount of interaction you receive on your posts from your followers (through likes, comments, shares, etc.) in comparison to your total follower count. 

Engagement rate health varies by platform and is never ever going to be 100% (or anywhere close to that for that matter). Take a look at these average engagement rates across popular social channels for all industries according to Rival IQ’s 2020 Social Media Industry Benchmark Report: 

Facebook: 0.9% 

Instagram: 1.22%

Twitter: 0.045%

So, for every 100 followers you have on Facebook, you should receive just under 1 like, comment, or share, to be reaching the median for the platform. In the name of full disclosure, the commonsku Twitter account in May of 2020 had an engagement rate of 3%. By contrasting that to the average across industries of 0.045% or even the average for the tech & software industry of 0.027% we can breath easy knowing our content is performing above average for the time being with our current campaigns. 

By looking into your own engagement rates, and comparing them to industry averages for your sector, you can determine if you are below, above, or exceeding the medians for the platforms and adjust your content accordingly. 

Follower Growth Rate

Whether you’re on social media for brand awareness or prospecting purposes, there is one social media goal everyone is after; follower growth. While it may be tempting to track raw follower growth, the growth rate for your platforms is far more useful in comparing your growth month over month. It can be simply calculated by dividing net followers by the follower count you started with at the beginning of the month. 

For example, if commonku’s Facebook account started the month of May with 1,452 followers, and gained 21 followers in May, that would make our growth rate for May 1.5% 

Monitor your growth rate over the next quarter to determine if your growth is upward, consistent, or downward, and adjust your strategy accordingly. 

Your Top Post on Each Platform 

Monitoring your top posts on each of your social media platforms is a simple and effective way to determine the content that your followers enjoy viewing and interacting with. 

Take the time to fully think through the aspects of the post that made it a success that month. Is it a text, photo, or video-based post? What was the call to action of the post? What hashtags, emojis, or links did you include? How much time did you spend crafting the imagery or caption?

All of this information can help you better understand your followers, and create future posts that cater to these interests. 

These three analytics will start you on your road to making informed and data-driven decisions when it comes to your content. Ultimately social media success is a fine line between data-backed strategy and instinct that can only come from knowing your brand fully. By opening the door to the insights tab on your socials, you’re entering a new level of effective social media strategy that will ultimately help your business grow.

Try it for yourself! Start tracking these 3 things today and watch your online presence grow.