When it comes to the world of social media today, metrics are everything. From followers to likes, and even the number of viewers watching your Instagram Story, these numbers can help drive your social content strategy and ultimately make a decision on what’s working for your audience. Read on to understand more about reporting metrics for followers versus engagement, and how to best utilize these numbers for your social profiles.
Reporting
Although it sounds like more work than it is, creating simple monthly reports to track the performance of your social profiles is a great tactic to better understand your audience and how they’re interacting with the content delivered. Thankfully, many social platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn now have analytics and audience insight features in-app. This allows you to take a closer look at specific dates with everything from likes, impressions, and even link clicks. For tracking purposes, it’s best to compile this data into an easily accessible document that you can update each month while continuing to optimize what’s performing best each cycle.
Now that you have an idea of the importance of reporting your monthly social metrics, it’s essential to understand the difference between followers vs. engagement, and which to pay close attention to.
Followers
As straightforward as it sounds, followers are the number of people subscribed to your page and posts. Each time you publish a new article, graphic, or company update, your followers will see it, and hopefully, interact. In a world of extreme focus on numbers and popularity, many can get caught up on this metric, and lead to the idea that the more followers they have, the more successful they or their content will be. However, just because an account or social media personality has a certain amount of numbers attached to their name or highly-curated likeness, doesn’t decide how relevant their content is to that audience, and therefore should not be the main focus when developing your social strategy. Of course, a larger audience is always the end goal, but it’s best to focus on making your content the most engaging and useful for your current audience through optimization each month, in hopes that its enhanced relevance will organically increase your following. In other words, pay attention to your followers and what this audience may consist of, but don’t let it drive the success of your organization and its respected space on a given platform.
Engagement
Engagement is essentially the actions that your followers or potential new audience complete on your posts, and it’s one of the greatest determinants of success for your social content strategy. From likes, shares, link clicks, reach, impressions, and anything else you could likely name, engagement takes a deep and analytical approach to your social profiles, providing useful insights and data on actual performance. With such a thorough look into each individual post and how they rank, you can quickly see the value in this over the number of followers. When reporting, be sure to include top versus bottom performing posts to understand how each aligns in place next to another, and easily rule out what shouldn’t be included in your social approach. Utilize these various metrics each month to understand what content or niche topics your audience is interacting with the most and develop your next few social posts around that or a similar structure.
Followers and engagement have a parallel relationship, and it’s essential to utilize this in your favor by tracking and reporting on the performance of your social posts each month to best structure your ever-changing content strategy.
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