Social Media Analytics (SMA) is the process of gathering data from social media platforms and processing it into relatable insights that can be used to improve your social media posts. The first and biggest step of this process is gathering data, but that alone is daunting with all the new terms that you encounter when you first start out gathering data.
In this post, I’m gonna be creating a data dictionary for the top three social media platforms: Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. So that you can have a better understanding of what an engagement is and how it is different from what a reach is. It’s important to understand the meaning behind the numbers before you can make sense of the data.
Instagram Insights have three tabs: Activity, Content, and Audience. We’re gonna dive into the terms and numbers in each of these three tabs. These insights are only accessible in 7-day increments. If you wish to see analytics for longer time periods, you will have to use other Instagram Insight tools.
Activity: Interactions
Profile Visits – The amount of users that have visited your Instagram profile
Website Clicks – The number of users who have clicked on the website link in your bio
Email – The number of times users have tapped on Email on your profile
Call – The number of times users have tapped on Call on your profile
These all add up to the Interactions number at the top of the section. From the graph, you’ll be able to see which day of the week had the most interactions.
Activity: Discovery
Reach – The number of unique accounts that have seen your posts
Impressions – The number of times that all your posts have been seen in that time period
This section is one of the most important one in Data Analytics as it tracks the influence of your Instagram page.
Content: Feed
Calls – The number of unique accounts that followed your call to action
Comments – The number of comments on your post
Emails – The number of unique accounts that followed your call to action with emails
Engagement – The number of unique accounts that Liked, Commented or Saved your post
Follows – The number of accounts that started following you because of any of your posts
Get Directions – The number of users who tapped Get Directions because of your post
Impressions – The total number of times your post has been seen
Likes – The total number of likes on your post
Profile Visits – The number of times your profile was viewed
Reach – The number of unique accounts that have seen your posts
Saved – The number of unique accounts that saved your post
Website Clicks – The number of times your website was clicked because of your post
Content: Stories
Impressions – The number of times your Instagram Story has been seen
Reach – The number of unique accounts that viewed the post on your Instagram Story
Exited – The number of times a user swiped away from a specific story
Replies – The number of replies to a particular photo or video in your story
Viewers – The specific users that have seen a particular post on your story
Forward – The number of users that skipped this Story post
Backwards – The number of users that went back from this Story post
Next Story – The number of taps to the next account’s story
Audience
Gender – The percentage split of your followers between Men and Women.
Age Range – The age brackets of your followers in a graph.
Top Locations – The locations of your followers based on City and Countries.
Followers – The most active times of your followers, by hour of the day and days of the week. You can click the arrows to switch through the days.
Insight: Overview
The overview of Facebook’s built in analytics is a summary of all the analytics combined. It highlights the most important parts of the data gathered into this page.
Page Views– The number of times a Page’s profile has been viewed by logged in and logged out people.
Page Likes – The number of new people who have liked your page broken down by paid and non-paid. This number is an estimate and may not be precise.
Post Reach – An estimate of the number of people who had any posts from your Page enter their screen.
Post Engagements – The number of times people have engaged with your posts through likes, comments and shares and more.
Page Followers – The number of new people who have followed your Page broken down by paid and non-paid. This number is an estimate and may not be precise.
Page Responsiveness – Response rate is the percentage of messages you responded to. Response time is the average time it took for your Page to respond to a message, based on the fastest 90% of response times.
If you wish to get into more details about Facebook’s analytics, you can export the data from the top right of the Insights page and it downloads as an Excel. You can choose the specific dates of the analytics that you want and it will break down all the data it gathered. For example, in terms of Reach, it divides it into organic, paid, and total reach so you can track how your paid promotions went.
Home
The Home Page divides the data into months. It will also say what the delta is from the last month in percentages as well as the highlight of that month in terms of top tweet, top follower, top mention, and top media tweet.
Tweets– The total number of tweets you have done for the whole month.
Tweet impressions – The number of all the times all your tweets have been viewed. It’s important to note that this only shows when the tweets are shown on Twitter and not when it is embed on third-party websites.
Profile visits – The number of times your Profile has been visited.
Mentions – The number of times your twitter handle was mentioned in tweets.
Followers – The total number of followers for your account in thousands.
Tweets
Engagement Rate– is a percentage that is calculated by dividing the number of engagements by the number of impressions.
Link Clicks – The number of times the link in your tweets have been clicked in the specified time period.
Retweets – The number of times your tweets have been retweeted in the specified time period.
Likes– The number of times your tweets have been liked in the specified time period.
Replies– The number of times your tweets earned a reply in the specified time period.
Furthermore on this page, you can see each individual tweets and how each performed in terms of Engagements, Impressions, and Engagement Rate. Clicking on each tweet will show Link Clicks, Replies, Retweets, Profile Clicks, Likes, and Detail Expands.
Audiences
The audience section is somewhat similar to the Instagram Audience section but goes into much more details. The top right hand side shows your audience size in total. Then, when going through the page, you can see that your audience are then divided into brackets and sections such as Interests, Gender, Household Income, Net Worth, Occupation, Consumer Buying Styles, Wireless Carrier, Home Ownership, Devices Used, TV Genres, and even Credit Card Holders.
The audience section of Twitter really categorizes your audience. It is depending on what your organization wants and needs to develop your data model and decide which section is important and relevant.