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Originally Posted On: How to Evaluate and Understand Your Social Media Reports — Bastion Elevate

Over 3.5 billion people in the world use social media, and that number is only rising.

If your company isn’t on social media, get on it! If you’re already on it but aren’t quite sure how to use it properly, you’re in the right place.

Social media has become one of the best business tactics to use over the past few years. It’s gone from people using it to post cute birthday pictures to companies using it as their main advertising platform.

To get the most out of your social media platforms, you need to fully understand your social media reports and what each report is telling you. Keep reading to find out how to analyze the reports to get results!

Pulling a social media report is pretty daunting the first time around. You’ll see terms and jargon that you may not be used to and want to give up.

Yet, looking at your social media campaign reports can make or break the success of your business. The first step is to create your social media goals. Then, you can act on them and analyze how you’re doing with the reports you pull.

Creating different social media accounts and posting when you want is one way to do it. Creating a social media account with specific goals and metrics in mind is the way that will get you results.

If you have social media accounts, you are most likely trying to accomplish a goal. First, figure out what you will use social media platforms for.

From there, you can decide the type of content you will post and what you want followers to do with the content when they see it. Ask yourself: Is the content for awareness, or do you want a customer to make a purchase? This will inform how you analyze your social media metrics.

It’s easy to get lost in the various ways of looking at how your social media is performing. Each social media platform has a different way of reporting your metrics, but the metrics remain similar across the board. You’ll find the metrics that you should be using as key performance indicators below to reach your social goals.

Engagement metrics are the most general social media metric to look at. This can help you see how your business is doing concerning likes and comments. If you’re wondering how people are responding to your content, this is where you want to look.

Engagement rate is extremely important for businesses or creators that want to work with others. Your engagement rate is the number of engagements on your post divided by the number of people who have seen the post.

To increase your engagement rate, looking at the number of likes, comments, and shares on each post will help you analyze your account health. The more likes, comments, and shares you have, the more engaged your audience is with your content. This also means that you have a “real” following versus bought followers or ghost followers.

To analyze your engagement, you have to look at the bigger picture. A high number of likes may be great, but it doesn’t necessarily mean the post performed well. If your caption asked for followers to comment on the post, and there are few comments, the post did not do well.

Have a lot of people saved your post? That means they valued the content you gave them in the post.

Looking at engagement as an overarching strategy will help your business succeed. However, you need to look at the engagement based on the post itself to fully understand how you can improve your strategy.

If you’re looking to increase brand awareness or grow your following, you’ll want to increase the number of people who see your content.

The two metrics to look at to see how you are performing in this category are reach and impressions. Reach refers to the number of unique viewers who see your content. Your impressions are the number of times your content was shown to your audience, whether through shares, searches, or displays on your feed.

If you want to know how many people are seeing your content, reach is what you should look at. When looking at impressions, you are seeing the number of times your content was shown to people. This could mean someone saw it twice on the same day on their feed or because someone else shared the content.

When looking at paid ads management, zooming in on reach and impressions is crucial to see how your posts and ads are doing and how many people are seeing them. This will help you determine if continuing to pay for them is worth it.

One of the best ways to grow your social media and awareness is by focusing on your hashtag usage.

Often overlooked as a tool that can help you grow, hashtags hold a lot of power in the social media world. For example, if someone on Instagram searches a specific location and you put a hashtag for that location on a recent post, that user will see your content. From there, you reach people you may not have without the hashtag.

Working these into your posts or adding them after the fact will increase the number of people who see your content.

If one of your main social media goals is to get conversions, then you need to look at this on your social media campaign reports.

Most of the time, conversions mean that someone went to your site, saw your content, and made a purchase because of it. However, it can also mean that someone signed up for your blog or followed you on Instagram because of a specific post.

Boosting content through ads is one way to increase conversions as well.

Although the traffic metric cannot be applied to every social media platform, it is important to look at the ones that apply.

When analyzing social traffic, you can see how long customers or followers are looking at your content, how long they spend on your website, and how long they spend on specific content. These metrics allow you to see what type of content your audience likes to engage with and what they could possibly want more of.

To boost traffic to your social media platforms or your website, take a broader look at your social media reports. Looking at overall engagement, the timing of your posts, the hashtags you used, and other metrics will help you increase overall traffic.

Additionally, take into consideration what you would want to see as an audience member. Provide value to them and they’ll keep coming back for more.

Depending on the social media platform, the timing may be different. But the overall idea of it remains the same. You want to know the best times to post content to reach a higher number of people.

When analyzing social media reports, you can see what the best posting time is, the best day to post, and when your audience is most engaged. You can also see how many posts per week you’ve done in the past, and which weeks have brought in the most engagement.

Because each platform has different metrics and followers, knowing the time to post on each platform is important. If most of your followers on Instagram are from Australia, you’ll want to post at a different time than if your followers on Facebook are from the United States.

Using these metrics to determine the best time to post based on the day will help your business goals.

It may not seem important at a quick glance whether your audience is mostly made up of men or are predominantly young females. Yet, that is one metric that can dictate how you go about your social media management.

Going through your demographics report will help you understand what types of people you are attracting based on your content. Are you attracting your target audience? Are you reaching multiple age brackets and countries?

Asking yourself these questions can drastically impact your business results and help you to hone in on your target audience.

Are you ready to use your social media reports to up your game? Do you want to pull your social media reports to analyze your company’s data? We’ve got you covered!

Contact us today to get the jumpstart on seeing the results you want.