You may have been running your social media for a while, or someone else has on your behalf, but how do you know what has worked and what has been successful? What’s the point in spending all your time posting on social media if you’re not checking regularly to see what’s effective? In this “Take Five”, we’re discussing questions you might like to consider in conjunction with your social media strategy.
Depending on what you’re trying to achieve via your social media eg brand recognition or driving traffic – different metrics will mean different things to you. In reviewing your insights, why not take the time to review which platforms are effective for you – your business doesn’t need to be on them all. It’s better to run one platform really well than to try and do too much and spread yourself too thinly. Be where your target market is.
Follower Numbers
Many people become obsessed with how many followers they have on their platforms. These are “Vanity Metrics”! It is far better to grow your followers organically and have an engaged and interested audience than lots of followers but not much audience activity on your account.
Be honest – have you bought followers? This is a really bad practice (see vanity metrics above). They won’t be your target market (and may not even be in the same country as you). What you do need to consider is do your follower demographics match your target audience?
Optimum Posting Times
Have a look to see when your followers are online and post accordingly. Try out different times during the day and see what happens. Annoyingly Facebook are now only reporting these results within your Page Insights in Pacific Time Zone so a bit more thought has to go into analysing them now!
Images, Reels, Videos or Graphics?
- Check to see what’s working on a regular basis. What’s more popular – single images, reels, multiple images, videos or graphics?
- Is there a particular subject matter that seems to be going down well?
- How does your Instagram feed look – are your pictures of a quality that keep followers coming back?
- Did you try something new? How did that work? It’s Ok to keep testing and refining to see what’s resonating with your audience.
Content
Questions to ask yourself …
- What’s working – subject matter-wise?
- Which posts are not working so well? Were they too salesy and less social?
- Too much text? Not enough text?
- Did you engage with the audience and ask them questions or did you just transmit and not seek engagement with your post? Don’t forget the “social” in social media!
Engagement
A more important consideration is your engagement rate. As mentioned above it’s not great if you have loads of followers but no engagement.
What’s your reach like? How many shares, comments or mentions is your account/page receiving? How about setting up an Excel spreadsheet to record your numbers weekly so that you can obtain an overall picture of how things are working.
Referrals – if your goal is driving website traffic – what are your Google Analytics looking like?
One of the things that may have an effect on your engagement is reach (the people who will see your post) and whilst organic reach on Facebook has been declining dramatically over the last few years, it now seems that similar is happening on Instagram. With the algorithm being regularly being tweaked it can sometimes feel like an uphill struggle. At some stage, you may consider allocating some of your digital budget to Facebook/Instagram advertising to ensure that you’re keeping in front of your customers (and discovering new ones).
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