If you’re putting time and money into marketing your business, it’s important to be able to track how well they are working. That way, you can adjust your strategy as you go and maximize your ROI.

When it comes to platforms like Instagram and Facebook, people tend to focus on one thing – the number of followers, but a higher number of followers doesn’t always equate with a genuinely interested audience, which is what you should really be aiming for! Luckily, there are actually many different metrics you can be tracking that will help you assess your social media success even better.

Likes

Likes are a very easy place to start, as they can give you a general idea of how a post is performing. While most of us can’t see the likes of other accounts on Instagram, they luckily still exist within our own social media insights. Likes can be an easy benchmark to track the success of one post against another! 

Comments

While you can expect a handful of likes, comments aren’t always a given. The number of comments you receive can help you understand how active your audience is and how much they connect to your account, as, typically, comments tend to come from people who are more loyal to your brand.

Shares

Shares will give you a hint as to which posts users find the most interesting in general. This could, of course, have a different meaning based on the type of post – depending on whether it’s a funny, serious, educational or simply visually appealing post. If you have a post with nine shares versus a post with only one share, it’s likely that your audience prefers the former over the latter type of post. 

Saves

In most cases, people save the posts that they find the most useful and believe they will want to revisit. If you find that a post has a lot of saves, it probably means that your followers found it very helpful and you should aim to continue providing this type of content!

General engagement

Your overall engagement is the average sum of all actions taken on each of your accounts posts, divided by the number of followers you have. This number gives you the percentage of how engaged your following is overall. It’s a bit more complicated and it’s easiest to use an app for this, like Grin. If you want to generally improve on Instagram, this is the most holistic number to look at. Find out more about why engagement is so important on our post about it here!

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