How to do a Deep Analysis of Social Content Performance

Total engagements, engagement rate, impressions, and follower counts are the most common social media performance metrics. Nevertheless, these don’t tell the complete story. There is a treasure trove of data waiting to be analyzed by those willing to take the extra steps and dedication. This level of analysis requires intermediate excel skills, primarily pivot tables and how to organize and clean data. Before you start your analysis, clearly define what insights and findings you are seeking, as you may feel overwhelmed by the amount of data that some platforms give. Don’t try to figure every minute detail out. Decide what data is truly needed to drive your business forward.

Understanding Your Social Media Data

There are two types of social media data: descriptive and performance. Descriptive data goes into the details of your creative. It can include asset name, audience, type of content, length, caption characters, post date, language, and more. This is data that you own, and not all of it will come with your data export. In some cases, there will be additional data you will integrate into the spreadsheet. Performance data describes how the audiences perceived and engaged with your ads. This is the bulk of the data you will export from the platforms. Some of the performance data can be added and calculated. For example, you can divide total clicks by total impressions to obtain a click rate. These data types can be categorized into three buckets: hierarchies, dimensions, and measures.

Hierarchies will be one overarching category that can be broken down into more specific units. For example, years break down to months and days of the week. Dimensions will be most of the descriptive data, which I see as different types of lenses that allow us to analyze a different perspective. One dimension that I use is experiments. Let’s say I want to find out if using emojis within the caption impacts engagement. I will create an experiment column and add a Yes or an amount for the total emojis used on a post. Finally, measures will be most of your performance data, custom measures, and calculations.

Organizing Your Social Media Data

For this section, please download this spreadsheet with dummy data. After exporting your data, you may want to remove unnecessary data. In my example, compare my raw data tab to my normalized data tab. You will notice the following:

1. Simplified ad names and pulled language and content type into new separate columns
2. The brand is the same, so that column got removed
3. Removed the Id column since is not needed for the analysis

When pulling data from different platforms into one consolidated spreadsheet, make sure to use the same columns for the same engagement types. For example, you can add the number of retweets into the share column since it is considered the same type of engagement.

The Analysis

The real fun starts once your data has been organized and categorized; go ahead and create a pivot table on a new tab. My method is to write the question I want to answer, followed by the data and then my analysis. This type of analysis allows you to go in-depth and answer all questions. Here are some thought-starters to get your analytics creativity going:

1. Do long captions impact engagement? – If you imported post captions, use the character count feature on Excel to quantify the number of characters and compare that to the engagement rate.
2. Does little buffer time between posts impact impressions? – If you have the time to post data, compare impressions.
3. How do different audiences perceive content? Are there stark differences or preferences between platforms?
4. How do short videos compare to longer videos? Where are users dropping off?
5. How does engagement vary by day of the week? Is there a day where content gets more lift?
6. Is your engagement indicative of upper funnel behaviors (likes) or mid-funnel (comments and shares, saves)?

I encourage you to try performing an analysis using this format. Don’t fall into the trap of trying to measure every single nuance. Plan and stick to those insights! Dominating this skill will set you apart and help you craft insights-based content; your audience will thank you.