Recently, there’s been a lot of talk: what works and what does not work, what sells and what doesn’t, however, work ratings in various social networks are based on subjective feelings and impressions.

Still, Internet marketing gives an opportunity to evaluate and calculate everything much more accurately, and all social networks and technologies allow us to understand the effectiveness of work by providing accurate statistics of individual posts and pages & communities in general.

Any social network has internal statistics. To see detailed statistics for your page or community, you must have administrator access to the community or page. It is done so that visitors could not see all the details of the page. If you do not have administrator access, ask those who manage your page (SMM manager or agency) to provide you with appropriate access in the page settings.

What you need to monitor first of all in any social network:

For individual posts: reach or number of views, number of interactions with the post (likes, conversions, comments, reposts). It’s good to compare these parameters of different posts with each other, i.e. watch which topics are more interesting to your audience, and which ones are not. What topics does your audience respond better with comments, on which posts people follow links more. Accordingly, based on these data, you can draw conclusions about whether your content matches the audience or not, and adjust the content policy.

For a page in general – dynamics of reach or number of page views, growth or outflow of subscribers, involvement of audience in page publications, summary and dynamics of posts, dynamics of actions on a page, etc. These data allow you to evaluate the work on a page for any certain period, e.g., for a day, week or month and draw conclusions about the effectiveness of a page or community impact on your audience.

For example, let’s consider several social networks.

Facebook

Log in to view statistics – in the top menu of the page, it’s called “Insights” or after clicking the “More” button at the top of the page the “Insights” button appears.

Then opens a page where you can find concepts already covered in our previous classes: reach, engagement, followers, etc.

Insights display interval can be set at the top of the statistical report, by default for the last 7 days.

In the overview, first comes the general insights of the page, then the summary comparative insights for individual posts, and below there is the report on performance comparison of your page with the pages of your competitors or partners. Pages for comparison are set by you.

In addition, there is a left menu, where all parameters can be viewed in more detail.

For a more in-depth study of insights, we recommend reading the help section.

Instagram

To view insights, you must have a business account.

Insights for each individual post – at the left bottom below the post there is a button “View insights”. It shows the number of likes, reach, as well as the number of “Visits” – it is the number of views of your profile from this post. In other words, a person saw your post and went to your profile to see what kind of company it is and what it is doing. “Follows” – the number of new followers, who subscribed to your account from this post.

General account insights – on the main page of the account (after clicking on the profile picture in the lower right) – call the menu by clicking on the parallel sticks in the upper right and select “Insights” there. Then opens a page with 3 points: Content, Activity, Audience.

In the Content section – post settings for a certain period:

Here you can also choose: which posts to see, for example, the screenshot below shows the coverage of all posts for a year:

Also, in order not to count manually, you can see the Engagement:

In the Activity section – statistics on the visitors actions in your account for a week:

in the Audience section – the growth / decline dynamics of followers, their age, gender, region, etc.

Learn more about Instagram insights.

Pinterest

To view your insights click on your profile button and go to Business hub. At this page you can see stats for your latest Pins and understand your overall presence.

Pressing Analytics button at the top left corner you can see Overview and Audience Insights.

At the Overview page you can see engagement, impressions, save rate, and many more statistics for a certain period, by default it is 1 month.

At the Audience Insights page you can find the detailed information on your audience, including age, gender, location.

Learn more about Pinterest profile management and advertising here: https://help.pinterest.com/en

External statistics of social networks is needed when you are looking for potential customers in social networks and then lead them to your website to inform in more details or make some kind of proposal. External statistics will show the number of clicks from each specific social network, information about users coming to the site, the number of pages that users of a particular social network read on your site, etc … So, if the source of traffic for your site is a social network, then you need to evaluate the quality of this traffic, not just the number of clicks.

Either Yandex Metrika or Google Analytics can do these tasks well. Yandex Metrika has a special report “Traffic Sources” and all social networks are highlighted separately.

Learn more about this report.

Conclusions: if you do not measure the effectiveness of social networks and do not monitor the reach and other parameters, all the efforts and expenses to promote a company through social networks might be useless, and sometimes even harmful.