You’ve created your social media accounts, you make posts and interact with people. Sometimes you hear murmurs about stats and numbers and post engagements but perhaps you’re not too sure what to look at. Why are social media stats important? And, what do the stats actually mean? In this article I explore the meaning behind those numbers and how they can help you.
At a later date, I’ll be drilling down into each major social media platform and how to understand their stats in detail but for this article I’ll focus on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and will try to provide you with a simple guide to social media stats.
What are social media stats?
Social media stats tell you important information about your audience and content on a specific social media channel. The stats can reveal information about your audience (followers) demographics and when they are most active and which of your posts are performing best or worst, but that’s just the beginning!
Why are social media stats important?
Stats are important to your social media or digital marketing strategy as they can help you to understand if you’re reaching the right people (potential customers) and what content they best interact or engage with. This will help you to create more relevant, valuable content for social media and enable you to post it at the times that your audience is most likely to see it.
What can social media stats help with?
Depending on the platform, social media stats enable you to analyse the types of posts and content that’s doing well, the times of day your current audience is most active and can help you to figure out if you are reaching the right people. You can find out information such as the gender, age group or location of your audience. The numbers can help you to decide when the best time to post might be, based on when your audience is most active and even give you an indication of which type of post content is performing best. When I say performing best, that means the content with the most number of relevant engagements which is what you are aiming for (for instance, likes, shares and comments).
The difference between stats on the main social media platforms
Facebook is used by 2.8 billion people (1.8 billion of those visit the platform on a daily basis!) so it’s still a very useful platform for your business. If you’d like to promote your products or business on the platform, Facebook guidelines ask you to create and use a ‘page’ rather than use your personal profile. Setting up a page is beneficial as it allows you to see your stats whereas a personal profile doesn’t.
Facebook stats include (but aren’t limited to) the number of followers (page likes or follows), their gender, where they are from, the times they are most active, how well your posts are doing (based on reach and engagement) and what type of post it was (image, text, link or video). Interestingly, I discovered that one of the peak times my Facebook page audience is most active is at 3am!
Did you know that Facebook even has a free training programme, Facebook Blueprint, to help you make the most of the platform? If you have paid content (called Facebook ads), Facebook Ads Manager, is where you manage your ads and can see how well they are performing but I’ll get into that another time.
Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, requires you to have a business account if you’d like to see your statistics within the platform. Across the globe, Instagram has 1 billion monthly active users and 500 million users check the app daily!
Some freelancers or small businesses prefer to keep a personal Instagram account but you can really start to understand your audience and content performance much better by using a business account. As there are so many different content types on Instagram right now, it’s really useful to look at your stats to help you understand which format is working best for you. In order to set up an Instagram business account, they require you to have a Facebook page to connect to, so make sure you set this up before changing your account type. Once you have a Facebook page set up, you can easily convert an existing Instagram profile to a business one in just a few taps.
You can also manage your Instagram ads in Facebook Ads Manager or directly within the Instagram app itself.
Twitter has 353 million monthly users (and 193 million daily users) and works a little differently to Facebook and Instagram. You will need to turn your Twitter analytics on. (You can do this by clicking the Analytics tab under more options when you’re logged into the platform). Twitter stats or analytics mainly focus on your tweets and how well they are performing. As the Twitter timeline works differently to Facebook and Instagram, posts are traditionally much more short-lived so Twitter encourage you to post a lot more frequently.
Twitter stats provide information about your top tweet for the month (which tweet has had the most engagements) and also information about your top follower (the newest follower with the most follows). Other stats include how many users have visited your profile, how many new follows you received and your tweet impressions (how many times a Tweet has appeared in somebody’s timeline).
Other platforms like LinkedIn, TikTok or Snapchat might be relevant for your business and are worth exploring if you think your ideal customer might be found there. I’d love to know how you get on!
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