Tag Archives: Instagram insights

The Metrics that matter – and what you can ignore!

Person reviewing analytics beside text: Which metric is the most IMPORTANT? Reach vs. Impressions – Does it matter? Stop stressing over Vanities! Am I looking at the right numbers? Engagement Rate: A key indicator? Followers are just numbers? How to prove ROI? Which one REAL success? Is CTR important? Save time: Track only vital stats Data overwhelm! Likes are vanities! Traffic to Followers are just numbers? Stop stressing over Vanities! Can I ignore SHARES?

One of the biggest problems with Facebook and Instagram insights is that there are so many numbers to look at. When you’re run off your feet, running your small business, there’s just not enough time in the day to look at every single one – and the good news is that you don’t have to!

You don’t have to be a social media data analyst as well as everything else! You simply need to understand enough about the numbers so you can make better marketing decisions.

There is no single most important figure!

There really isn’t – it all depends on what you’re trying to achieve with your social media posts.

  • If you’re trying to grow your audience, follower growth and reach may be useful.
  • If you’re trying to build engagement and community, comments, shares and saves become more important.
  • If you’re trying to drive people to your website, link clicks matter.
  • If you’re trying to generate enquiries, messages and website visits will be more important than likes.

So, the first question to ask yourself is ‘What am I trying to achieve?’ Then you know where to start.

Metric 1 – Reach

Reach is worth looking at as it tells you how many people your content was shown to. But don’t think that just because you have a higher reach, that it’s a better post. That’s not necessarily true. A post can reach thousands of people and generate absolutely no meaningful response.

A different post might reach a much smaller audience, but result in comments, shares, website visits or enquiries.

Reach tells you about visibility – it doesn’t tell you about value. 

Metric 2 – Shares  

For most businesses, shares are one of the most interesting things to keep an eye on, because they mean that someone has thought that your post is worth passing on to their followers.

Why might it be shared? It could be that it’s funny, inspirational, useful, relatable or because they think it might help their followers. Whatever the reason, the point is that it’s been shared – they didn’t just scroll past.

So, if you get shares, look at the post and see why – what made people want to share it? Then you can think of ways to create similar content with the same qualities.  

Metric 3 – Saves

Saves are another useful metric – it again shows that you stopped the scroll long enough for someone to read your post and think it’s worth saving for later. Saves are often the result of educational or inspirational content.

If you get a save on your posts, it’s worth looking at it and finding out why – again, you can then create similar posts in future.

Metric 4 – Comments

Comments – this is my favourite metric! It shows that your content has started a conversation, or someone might be asking a question or sharing their opinion of what you’ve written.

Comments give you useful information about what matters to your audience. Look at the type of comments you get…It’s inevitable, you’ll get the odd ‘love this’, ‘cute’, or just ‘have a good day’. But you’ll also get comments such as ‘I’ve been struggling with exactly this’, or you may get a question asking for more information or giving you an example of their experience.

These comments can help give you more ideas for future content and spark a two-way conversation – or both. Your audience is telling you what they like, dislike or what they could really use help with.

Metric 5 – Link clicks and website visits

If you want to achieve driving more traffic to your website, this is the metric to look at. You might post something that gets 50 likes – you might post something that only gets 10. But if the second post generates 8 website clicks and the first doesn’t generate any, which one is more useful to your business?

This is another reason why likes shouldn’t automatically be your measure of success.

Metric 6 – Profile visits

This tends to be more linked to Instagram – profile visits can tell you that your post has sparked curiosity. Someone saw it and thought that they need to check out your business – so they go to your profile to find out more.

BUT, if lots of people are visiting your profile, but very few are following you or contacting you, look at your profile.

Is it clear? Does it clearly explain who you are, what you do/sell, or what you help people with? Does your personality shine through. Is there a clear reason why someone should want to click on your website to find out more?

Sometimes your insights don’t just tell you what’s working – they also help you find out where you need to improve things.  

Metric 7 – Follower growth

Ok, so I know that I have said before that you don’t need to become obsessed with follower growth – and you don’t, but it does matter.

It matters in that it’s useful if your growing audience are potential customers. But 2,000 random followers aren’t necessarily better than 500, if those 500 genuinely like your business and want what you sell or offer.

Remember too, that net follower growth gives you a more realistic picture that simply looking at how many new followers you’ve gained. Look at this metric more as a trend than a daily score. Are you gradually attracting the right people?

Now – what can you ignore?

OK, maybe not so much ignore, but more you can stop being obsessed about!

Likes – they’re not meaningless as they are a useful indication that someone enjoyed your content. But they don’t tell you everything – and there are people who scroll through Facebook and Instagram and just stick a like by every post.  

Don’t be disappointed if your post doesn’t get lots of likes, it might still generate website visits, profile visits, enquiries or sales – and even shares and saves. You need to look at the bigger picture.

Impressions – This is a number that can be useful, but if you’re already thinking the analytics you already know about are a lot, you could discard this one. Impressions are useful if you’re trying to understand how often content is being shown. It only tracks visibility – let me give you an example. Your post shows it reached 100 people, but impressions say 300. Your reach is the actual number of people who were shown it – impressions are the number of times it was looked at, so could be multiple times from one person. It could be that on one particular day; your post appears in the same person’s feed every time they go into it. This will count as 1 reach, but multiple impressions. So, not really an accurate number.  

Don’t worry about…

  • The fact your engagement rate went from 4.2% to 3.9%. It will fluctuate every day.
  • Don’t worry if your reach dropped slightly from one week to the next.

Your audience behaves differently every day and from week to week. You know that there will be some weeks that you see businesses you follow in your feed – other times, you won’t see any that you know or follow. This all affects your numbers.

  • The algorithm changes
  • People go on holiday
  • School holidays happen
  • The weather changes
  • Life happens

All these things affect the numbers…surprisingly! My advice is to look for patterns, not tiny fluctuations. 

Don’t worry about your follower count from yesterday. You may have gained three followers; you may have lost six. Your follower count isn’t going to tell you much about how your marketing is performing.

This is one statement I always remember from some training I did early on about social media…

You’re building a business, not taking part in a popularity contest.

This is so true! I see businesses posting that they got an award from Facebook for starting conversations or for putting out engaging content. I’m going to share something now – I HAVE NEVER EVER had any of these in the whole 14 years I’ve been in business – NOT ONCE!

It used to really bother me – now it doesn’t – I’m happy for those of you who do, but I’m happy that my content is liked because my audience say so and react! That’s not to take away from those who do get these recognitions – I’m pleased that small businesses get noticed – and Facebook absolutely should do that!  But if, like me, you don’t get those accolades, don’t let it worry you!

Finally, here is a summary of what you should track… 

  • If your goal is visibility – look at Reach
  • If you goal is engagement – look at comments, shares and saves
  • If your goal is website traffic – look at link clicks and website visits and check you have those links in your profile or bio.
  • If you goal is audience growth – look at follower growth and net follower growth.
  • If your goal is enquiries – look at messages, profile visits and website clicks

Finally, if your goal is sales – you need to look beyond the metrics and look at your marketing and how it actually contributes to sales. For sales, marketing is the most important metric of all – your strategy, your content, and how it all fits together.

Remember – your aim isn’t to create one lucky post, it’s to understand your audience well enough to create more of the content they actually want to see – and that’s where your metrics help. 

If your goal is more sales, I can help you look at your marketing strategy and help you build a workable one, along with a content strategy and your customer journey – all in easy to follow, step by step instructions.

Message me if you want to get your marketing on track for more sales.

Marketing Made Simple. 

Facebook & Instagram insights explained: Stop being confused by the numbers!

Magnifying glass over colorful data network and analytical charts

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.