Reporting
What’s valuable to report on and how to use that information, reporting spreadsheets, what the numbers mean, and benchmarking.
What’s valuable to report and how to use it
One of the great things about posting content to social media is that the impact of it is quantifiable, and presented to you by each social media platform.
Engagements = likes, comments, reactions and shares
Reach = the total number of people who have seen your content
Impressions = the number of time your content has been displayed, no matter if it’s been read or clicked on
Mentions = when your content is shared by another account e.g. A quote retweet, or shared to another user’s profile
Engagement rate = engagements divided by total reach
Engagement rates are generally the best indicator of how well your content is doing. Average engagement rates are:
Instagram: 0.5%
Facebook: 0.16%
Twitter: 0.08%
That’s why it’s worthwhile investing a little more time into Instagram.
Reporting spreadsheets
It’s important to keep an eye on your social media analytics, and noting down data in a spreadsheet is an easy way of comparing one month to the next.
As an example, below is the central accounts spreadsheet template. The Audience Development team also have a follower count spreadsheet, which tracks the follower numbers of every LMG affiliated account on a quarterly basis.
Benchmarking
Looking at other museum and gallery social media accounts can help benchmark how our content sits with online audiences.
And it’s not about looking solely at the numbers: a tweet of ours may receive 10 likes, compared to a British Museum tweet that gets 100. But the British Museum have lots more followers than us, so proportionally, that means our content has a higher engagement rate.
Whenever you clock any content that other accounts are putting out, that is well engaged with – maybe it’s an Instagram post with lots of comments underneath, or you’re seeing something quote retweeted lots of times on Twitter – think about why that might be. We can then take that away, and find a way to emulate that content in a way that fits for our brand.
