How to evaluate your social media, when looking at a new strategy

We write a lot for people who have never dipped their toes into the world of social media, but what if you’ve already got active and posting accounts, but they’re not being as effective as you’d like? Rather than scrapping them and starting again which might end up seeing you throw the baby out with the bath water, how can you evaluate your business profiles to take forward the good bits, and leave the not-so-good to be forgotten in the depths of the internet?

It doesn’t have to be painful. Make yourself a coffee, put Do Not Disturb on your phone, and take half an hour to conduct a quick audit of your social media.

Create somewhere to store your information

Create a document or a spreadsheet where you’ll be able to save the information you gather from each of your social platforms. You’ll need sections for the URL of each platform, your follower count, successful content, and engagement. You might find that as you go along, you adapt to make your spreadsheet or table a bit more complex to meet your needs, with information that’s unique to each platform, but for the minute we’re going to keep it nice and simple – it’s our aim not to scare you off!

Analysing Facebook

Visit the Facebook Business Suite in order to be able to see all of your analytics and post information that’s going to be useful to you going forward.

You want to look at the number of page likes, the number of post engagements, and links to the most popular posts. Have a think about why the posts are popular. Are they all videos? Are they all of the office dog? Are they helpful tips about moving house? Make a note on your document, so you know what content your followers love to start with.

Analysing Instagram

With Instagram, in order to be able to see all the good stuff and the useful insights, you need to have at least 100 followers and a business account. If you haven’t done so, you can upgrade to a business account for free, but the analytics going forward will only show from the moment your Instagram profile became a business account.

Once you’ve done this, you can visit the ‘Insights’ page to see how your content is performing. If you click ‘content’ on this page, you’ll be able to see every single post from the last year along with their analytics. This will help you to see what the most popular content is on the platform. Is it video? Is it text heavy? Take note of anything with a higher than average number of likes. You can see similar analytics for Instagram stories, too. Use it to inform your spreadsheet.

What next?

Whether you’re going to be working on your social media yourself, or you’re hiring someone to do it for you, the information you’ve gathered will help you to articulate what’s worked well in the past, and what you’d like to see more of going forward. If you’re going to be doing your social yourself, make sure you set a regular date in the diary to do the above evaluation. Once a quarter or even once every six months is ideal, so you can see which areas you’ve progressed in, and which need work.

If you haven’t been as successful as you would have liked using social media, you don’t have to delete everything and start again, you’ve got some good data there, don’t waste it!