I think we’ve all spent time opening our insights on Facebook or Instagram and wondered what we’re supposed to be looking at and what all those numbers mean.

Over the next few weeks, throughout September, my blog posts are going to look at insights in more detail and hopefully help stop the confusion and expel some of the myths!

We’ve all seen the words…Reach – Engagement – Impressions – Profile visits – Follows – Unfollows – Shares – Saves – Clicks – Watch time. And they all come with percentages that seem to change every time you look at them! I’ve given up on them many times in the past, until I decided to look more closely and try to find out and understand how they work.

The good news is that you don’t have to understand every single number and you most definitely don’t need to check your insights every day – it can become an obsession!

The purpose of your insights isn’t meant to be a ‘school report’ on how well you’re doing – the figures are there to help you understand what your audience is responding to – in order to help you make better marketing decisions.

What are insights?

Insights are provided by Meta specifically for business and professional accounts on Facebook and Instagram.

They are all about your audience’s behaviour and how they react to your posts.

The first thing I’d say is don’t get obsessed with your follower count. This changes as people follow and unfollow for various reasons. Sometimes you gain loads of followers, other times your count stays static for weeks. Most of us worry about our followers and often celebrate when we reach a certain magic number – whatever that might be!

I understand why you might think it’s important – one day you have 500 follower and a few weeks later, it’s jumped up to 800. You must be doing something right and it feels like progress. And I’m not saying it isn’t, but your follower count is only one tiny piece of the insights puzzle.

You can have 3,000 followers, but your posts might only reach 300 of them. Someone else may only have 400 followers, but regularly have people sharing their posts, saving them, visiting their profile, and clicking through to their website. So which account has the more useful audience?

I don’t need to answer that! But what I am going to do is look further than follower numbers.

Follower vs Net Followers

This causes a lot of confusion.

• Your followers are simply the number of people who currently follow your account.
• Your net followers are the people who have followed you in a set period of time (say the past 28 days) – MINUS the number of people who unfollowed you.

Sometimes the numbers will go backwards and for all sorts of reasons. They could simply be interested in something else now, they could be clearing out their account of people they no longer interact with or just reducing the number of people they follow. 

And it can often be because you don’t interact with them – but if you have thousands of followers, it’s impossible to interact with them every day, or even every week or month.

So, let’s look at the other metrics…

Reach – how many people saw your content.

Reach is the figure that tells you approximately how many individual account your content has been shown to. It’s a good one to look at as it gives you an idea how far your content is going. For example, if one post reaches 1,000 people and another reaches 200, it’s worth having a look to see what was different about those posts.

• Was one of them more useful?
• Was it more entertaining or more relatable to your audience?
• Did people share it?
• What type of post was it? Was it a static post, a carousel, a reel?
• Was it simply that the subject matter appealed to a wider audience?

It’s always a good idea to find out WHY it achieved that reach – it doesn’t mean to say the post with the most reach should be more celebrated – it might just be that you did something that made it reach more.

Engagement

This is about what people did after seeing your content. Depending on what your content was, this could be:

• Likes and reactions
• Comments
• Shares
• Saves
• Clicks
• Other interactions

These are all classed as engagement but are not all equal! For example, a like is nice, but someone saving your post because they want to come back to it later is a much stronger form of engagement and a sign they found it useful.

Someone commenting is good, so long as the person who comments has read your post and engages with it, rather than just ‘nice,’ ‘cute’ or ‘have a nice day.’ And someone sharing your post is a stronger form of engagement as they like it enough to share with their followers.

Finally, someone clicking through to your website or to your profile is taking an action that could lead to a sale – or showing interest that they want to find out more about you and what you do.

So, all forms of engagement are different and have their own place. When looking at your insights, it’s worth looking at ‘what did someone actually do after reading my post?’

Sometimes your insights can highlight a problem that isn’t anything to do with your content. For example, someone new to your page sees your content and visits your profile. Then nothing! It could highlight that your need to look more closely at your bio – does it say on the tin what you do and who you help?

Website clicks and messages.

If the goal of your content is to generate enquiries, sales or bookings, this particular metric is much more meaningful to you than anything else.

• Are people clicking through to your website?
• Are they clicking your link?
• Are they sending you messages?
• Are they taking the next step you want them to take?

At the end of the day, your social media content isn’t there to just look pretty and collect likes. It’s there to help you build relationships with potential customers and move people towards your business.

How often do you look at your insights?

You may be reading this and thinking I hardly ever look at mine – you may be thinking, I look every day.

I’m certainly not suggesting you spend time looking at them every day, or even every week – but it’s a good idea to look at least once a month – so regularly but not obsessively!

A monthly look can help you see patterns with types of content and help you see what kind of posts work for you.

If you take a step back and look at the past 3 months (90 days), you will be able to see:

• What worked?
• What didn’t?
• What surprised you?
• What did people respond to?
• What should you do more of?

Insights are there to help you make your next decision about the content to you put out. It’s not there to tell you if your content was good or bad.

I don’t want you going away from this article feeling that you need to understand every metric – or that looking at your insights is something you SHOULD be doing. I just want to help you understand what they are and what they tell you. You certainly don’t need to become obsessed with it!

I’d suggest you use your insights to just ask a few simple questions:

• Are the right people finding you?
• What content gets their attention?
• What content makes them take action?
• What should you create more of?

This is the ‘marketing made simple’ way!

Let me finish with a little challenge if you want to understand your insights. 

The next time you decide to look at your Facebook or Instagram insights, don’t look at your follower count first. Look at your content from the last 30 – 90 days and find three posts that performed really well.

Then look at them and answer these questions:

• What do these three posts have in common?
• Are they similar in content?
• Do they have the same format? (such as being a reel)

You might find out exactly what your audience is telling you about the kind of content they like. I hope you’ve found this helpful, and as usual, if you have any questions, feel free to ask.

Next week, I’m going to look at ‘The Metrics that matter – and what you can ignore!’

Feature image generated by AI.