What are Analytics?
While analytics are just statistics and data, they very useful when determining how well your post does in terms of interactions with people who do and don’t follow you. It allows us to better understand what is successful, what helps bring more attention to a post, and tells us overall who our main audience is.
The reason why analytics are important is that it calculates all of your profile and content interactions, which can then help you learn how to improve future posts to help reach a bigger audience and be successful. Understanding analytics can help set goals, plan for the future, and see what is and isn’t popular. Today, we are specifically going to talk about engagement rate.
What is Engagement Rate?
If you were to look up the definition of Engagement rate, you would learn that it pretty much is what it sounds like. It’s a form of calculation to determine how many interactions your content receives per your amount of followers. In terms of a formula, you take your total number of interactions, divide it by your total followers, and then multiply that by 100%.
Content interactions? What is that?
When referring to interactions with your content, this means your total amount of shares, likes, and comments that a post receives. All these things have to do with how interactive your followers are with the content you share. After calculating the engagement rate, you can then determine what your followers do and don’t like.
Personal Testimony
For me, engagement rates are very important when it comes to my job. As an American Eagle In-Store Influencer, it is my job to post photos on Instagram. I model clothing online to help bring in customers and increase online sales. In return, I am able to build a bigger following on my social account.
Understanding the engagement rate is important because it allows me to understand what brings in followers and shows what my followers are and aren’t interested in. Using those analytics will help me plan better content for the future and will hopefully increase my engagement rate.
Above you can see how Instagram lists out the data for each post to help you better understand how your post performed.
In the end, Is it really important?
When it comes to social media and why people use it, there are many reasons why it could be useful. Most people use social media for fun, and to post pictures they may want to share with friends and family. For others, like big and small businesses, it’s a way to interact with customers, to help share things they want to promote and sell. For influencers, it’s a way to help build their following which helps them become more well-known and successful. Understanding and utilizing your engagement rate can allow these groups of people to improve their future posts, which then leads to more people being interested in what they have to show and say.
Need Help? Here are some tools
Now that you understand what Engagement rate and analytics are, you may be wondering how you can figure all this out by yourself without having to calculate it. For those of you who use Instagram, the account Insights already provides it for you. As long as you are set up as a business account, Instagram provides an overview of your Engagement percentage, your overall demographics, and the days and times your content is most popular. It’s free and really easy to set up.
For all other social media accounts, you can use Fohr which shows you your overall analytics for any social media account that you connect it to. While I’m still new to Fohr, it has definitely allowed me to see my overall statistics so I can better understand my followers.
Fohr allows you to link all your social media accounts so that it can analyze all of your statistics for each account, and show an overall trend.
Teaching Social Media 