One of the main reasons social media can be incredibly useful to businesses is because of the data that can be collected to enhance performance. Unfortunately, analytics can also be a minefield to navigate due to its ever-changing nature and the lack of information available when it comes to interpretation. Luckily, this blog post is going to not only show you how to read and understand your analytics, but I’m also going to show you some top secret formulas only the most elite marketers use.

It’s important to mention that despite this article focussing on Instagram’s platform. Most of this information can be translated and used on any social media platform.

Before we get into the boring math part (yuck!). Let me quickly explain to you what your analytics mean from the Instagram app itself.

Social Media Analytic #1: Reach

Facebook defines reach as simply the total number of people who have seen your content. I like to personally think of this number as your brand awareness.

One of the simplest ways to grow your social media account is simply to increase your account’s reach.

There are multiple ways to do this with widely different levels of complexity. You can increase reach through the use of paid ads which can guarantee a certain number of views. This isn’t always recommended and I’ll explain to you why when we go to analyze the data.

The second way to increase reach is by creating better content. If people like your content they are much more likely to interact with it which then tells the algorithm to push your content out to more people. This technique is technically ‘free’ but don’t let that lure you into thinking it’s not a lot of work and doesn’t require the help of professionals.

The third way to increase reach is to engage with people in your community. This can effectively ‘trick’ the algorithm into assuming your content is higher performing than it truly is. Another bonus with this method is you can usually acquire sales in the process if you engage with your target audience.

Social Media Analytic #2: Engagement

Buffer defines social media engagement as a metric that measures how many people are interacting with you, your content and your brand. Interactions can come in a variety of forms including

• Likes
• Comments & DM’s
• Shares
• Saves
• Profile Visits
• Mentions

If you zoom out and look at the bigger picture - engagement essentially measures the health of your community as a whole and whether or not your content is truly resonating with your target audience. In other words, if people aren’t actively involved with you and your brand, chances are you need to invest in community building strategies and switch up your content strategy.

Facebook takes this a step further by looking for “meaningful engagement” which means they look at the quality of the engagement that is occurring on your page. Genuine fans and comments will get you further than emoji or spam comments.

As mentioned previously, engagement also has an impact on reach so keep that in mind when we get more into analyzing these metrics. 

Social Media Analytic #3: Followers

At last we come to the most popular metric of all: your follower count. 

This metric has long been considered a “vanity metric” that shouldn’t be paid any attention to. However, I like to think of it as a big picture metric that gives you a variety of information about the overall health of your account. It can also act as social proof for potential new customers and increase perceived trustworthiness.

Let’s reverse engineer the process a new follower goes through.

Typically, the user needs to be exposed to your account (this is impacted by your reach). 

Next, they will usually read your profile and decide whether or not your content applies to them or not (your profile optimization plays a role here).

If the new profile visitor feels like your content is of interest to them they will typically scroll through your content. Here they are looking to learn something new, be entertained, or inspired. If your content is able to fulfill one or more of these 3 needs, they are likely to hit the follow button.

I hope you can realize that a profile visitor goes through many steps BEFORE they decide to follow you and it’s important to optimize each step to increase this metric.

How to Analyze the Data

In order to analyze analytic data effectively and use it to improve your account’s performance, it’s important to decide on your goal. For argument’s sake, let’s assume you have one of three goals

1. You want to increase your following
2. You want to increase your engagement
3. You want to drive more traffic to your website (in hopes of seeing more sales)

How to Use Analytics to Grow Your Following

Like most brands, let’s assume you want to grow your following (who doesn’t). In order to increase our following, we are going to look at a specific metric that isn’t talked about much in the industry: Profile Conversion Rate.

Your profile conversion rate is simply 

# of Profile Visitors/New Followers *100 = Profile Conversion Rate

This formula gives you insight into how well your content resonates with your audience and how effectively you are converting new profile views into followers. 

A healthy profile conversion rate is above 20%. Amazingly, we were able to get our own profile conversion rate up to 50%.

If your profile conversion rate is less than 20%, you want to look at 2 things:

1. Your profile optimization
2. Your content

It is highly likely that your profile is not optimized in a way that resonates with your target audience and makes them want to know more. OR it can be a sign that your profile isn’t even filled out all the way. 

Make sure your profile on Instagram has story highlights, a clickable link, a persuasive bio, and keywords that your target audience is most likely searching for.

Next, look at your content. Is your content delivering on what you promised to give to your followers in the bio?

I cannot tell you how many realtors are posting content about their kids and plants. If you are a realtor, you want to make sure you’re posting content that helps first time homebuyers. Unfortunately, cute photos of your kids or plants just aren't going to help them (neither is standing beside a sign that says SOLD).

When BOTH your profile and content are optimized, your profile conversion rate will increase.

This leads us to phase 2 on our journey to our goal: how much is our reach?

When you have a healthy profile conversion rate, you want to increase your reach as much as possible in order to reverse engineer your follower goal. 

For example, if I want to grow by 10,000 followers this month and my profile conversion rate is sitting at 50%, then I need at least 20,000 profile visits to reach this goal.

How to Use Analytics to Increase Engagement

If your goal is to increase your engagement, then you want to look at two things:

1. How engaged are YOU in your community?
2. Is my content high quality?

Christos Nikos frequently talks about engagement as a reaction to something. It isn’t merely an action they take on your page. 

They had a strong enough reaction to your content that it required or encouraged an action of some kind on their part. They might have thought, omg this content is amazing I need to save this for later. Or they might have thought “this is the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen, Ted needs to see this.”

Now your content itself can influence engagement and is something to be looked at. 

(Your profile conversion rate discussed in the previous section can also help you make decisions about your content quality)

But a simple way to increase engagement is to become more involved in your own community. This can look like

1. Engaging with industry leaders
2. Starting conversations with your followers
3. Asking your audience questions in posts and captions
4. Being perceived as approachable (more human)
5. Liking and commenting on other people’s pages

At its core, engagement simply looks at the strength of your online connections. The more you invest into it, the more you’ll get out of it. I also like to think of engagement as your digital “customer service.”

How to Use Analytics to Drive Website Traffic

Finally, your goal might be to increase website traffic in hopes of generating a positive ROI. Similarly to increasing your following, this requires you to look at multiple metrics to improve results.

The first step is to look at your profile optimization. Story Highlights and a link in bio are especially important with this. Your story highlights should include things like

• A valuable resource (freebie, guide, training, etc.)
• Information about your product or service
• Testimonials/Reviews
• FAQ

Conversely, you should definitely have a link to your website present in your bio as well.

Next, we want to look at your content - specifically your content strategy. Your content MUST attract your target audience to your account. This has a lot to do with your profile optimization and using relevant keywords in your caption, hashtags, bio and posts. Next, your content must nurture and defeat any myths, mistakes or misperceptions that block people from buying your content, and then finally you should have content pieces that ask for a sale directly and actively showcase testimonials, social proof, and defeat objections.

Content that is set up this way, guides your follower towards the sale and builds demand for your products and/or services.

Finally, we want to look at whether or not your account is attracting your target buyer. For example, the largest demographic to make up Instagram is India. Now you might be a restaurant in Los Angeles and not care about targeting audiences outside your area.

• To control for this add your location
• Mention your location in your hashtags
• Review your follower insights and find the location of your followers

In Summary

Your insights and social media metrics are there to help you reach your social media goals. But they can only help you if you look at them and use them to analyze your metrics effectively.

If you are struggling with creating high quality social media content, download my free 60 content idea calendar to get an INSTANT content strategy to attract, nurture, and convert your followers into buyers!

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