I already have quite a few blogs around this topic, but I wanted to share a couple more thoughts on this. First off, in order to have the robust analytics that you want and need in your business, you'll likely need to have a business account. (Check out my blog on business accounts!)

Now, I’m going to share my experience with Instagram in this blog, because most of my marketing and engagement is on Instagram and Facebook. For Instagram, you won't have access to analytics until you have a business account. Now there’s nothing wrong with starting to share from your personal account, but you may eventually want to transition your personal account to a business account (which you can totally do!) so you can get some data about your business and how and when it’s being interacted with online. 

When you look at your Instagram analytics you can see a few different things. 

• Reach: How many people did a certain post actually reach?

  • I really love this feature, because it can show the imbalance between how many comments/likes your post receives and how many people it actually reaches. Often I hear things like “my post only got 4 likes” but they don’t know the reach. It may have gotten 4 likes but reached 100 people. 

• Likes: How many people liked a certain post?

• Saves: How many people saved a different post?

• Followership Increase: You can see the percentage increase of your followership. More specifically, it will show you how your followership has changed over the past 7 days. 

• Follower Demographics: You can see a breakdown of your demographics of your followers, between geographic location, gender, the time of days in which they're active on social media. 

• Highest Performing Posts: You can see which post was your highest performing in terms of engagement within a certain date range. 

These are just a few things that you can see on your analytics, and having that information is so powerful because it lets you know what type of content resonates with your audience. 

You can think about content a couple of different ways in this context, it could be the actual type of the post (was it an infographic, reel, video, testimonial) or it could be the style of the post (carousel or single image) or you can think about it in terms of the content within the post. Were you talking about a core value? Were you talking about something from your business framework? Were you sharing a personal story? 

These are all of the things that go into reviewing your analytics because all of these things give you feedback on what type of content is resonating with your audience, so that way you know what to continue to create.

Another part of your analytics that you want to monitor is the time of day when you have the most engagement. When I say engagement, I mean comments, likes, reach, and saves. So I would recommend going back to your most popular posts, and determining when you received the most engagement on your post. Was it Tuesday at 12pm? Maybe Sunday at 6pm. Once you know when your audience is online, that can influence when you post to increase your reach and engagement. 

Then the last thing that I'll name, is that you can use your analytics to determine the themes of your most popular posts. If you take a look at your metrics and find your top performing 30 posts, and of those 30 posts, determine the top 3 themes of those posts, you have another insight into what kind of content your audience wants to see and engage with. 

Being able to discern and recreate those themes, gives you almost the equivalent of as educators, when we have an assessment and we know this standard is going to be 50% of the assessment, this standard is going to be 30%, this standard is going to be 15, and then this standard's going to be five. Then you know you can spend time analyzing the data and reteaching that 50% and 30%. Those themes that you found are the ones you need to dig into. 

Those are just a few ways that you can leverage your social media analytics. Again, I’ve got plenty more blogs on using social media in your business, so be sure to check them out here! 

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