Whether you’re a Social Media Manager/Marketer or you manage your personal social media business page, you definitely need spreadsheets to organize your insights, data metrics and performance reports.
Research has shown that 95% of the most successful social media managers today use spreadsheets to organize their social media metrics and turn data into actionable insights.
Spreadsheets help to organize social media Insights which are the data driven information about the performance of contents you post on your social media pages and accessible information about your page’s following. For example, the total number of likes and comments a picture gets.
Major social media business platforms today like Facebook and Instagram provide their users with analytic tools that provide data on follower demographics (gender, age & location), posts performance (reach, interaction, likes, comments, shares & saves), followings (followers gained, followers lost), times your followers are most active on social media, your hashtag success and much more, all within specific periods, say a week or a month.
With spreadsheets, you can organize your social media insights, these insights are key to help you gain information about the general performance of your page, from your insights you could learn a lot about your audience, like what contents they love, what time of day they are most active and much more. With these information at your disposal, you could make lots of beneficial changes to your social media in a way it best suits the growth and overall performance of your page such as changing the time you post. Something we digital marketers like to call ‘turning data into actionable insights’.
But to be able to make such successful decisions, you need to organize these data in a spreadsheet, with spreadsheets, you get the clearer picture.
A spreadsheet is a software that helps you organize, analyse and store data.
For years, spreadsheets have been essential business and accounting tools.
There are two ways you can get a spreadsheet.
Spreadsheet softwares allow you custom design your own report. The most popular ones being, Google Sheet, Apple Number and Microsoft Excel.
Google sheets is a free, web-based spreadsheet application provided by Google within the Google drive service. The application is available as a desktop application on ChromeOs, mobile app on androids and iOS.
Google sheets can be accessed on Chrome browser or the Google sheet app on desktop and mobile.
It is a spreadsheet application created by Apple inc. it can be used on mobile iOS and desktop macOS.
Obviously, the organization of your insights depends on your social media goals. First state what you want to achieve and this helps you pick out the data most relevant to you to include in your spreadsheet.
For example; If your goal is to improve sales, you probably would want to pay attention to the number of people sending you messages through your social media pages to inquire about your products and include that into your spreadsheet, as well as the number of people who made that purchase and those who inquired but didn’t go through with the purchase.
Below is an image showing a sample of a twitter insight spreadsheet.
Fill in the most relevant data type related to your social media goals. If the number of likes a post on your page gets is relevant, you fill that in. Be it the comments, the shares or the saves.
The ‘total engagement column’ represents the sum total of the comments, likes, shares, clicks done on a particular post. This shows you which of your posts are performing best.
Categorize your social media posts based on their types of content. Example; you own a cooking business and you choose to group your content into two, the first as educative posts where you share short videos on making some dishes with your special recipes and the other as sales post.
Create as many categories as you like, but keep them manageable and general. Keep the specifics for the subcategories.
In the subcategories, you specify what a post actually is. For example; the jellof rice cooking tutorial video.
Now you fill up your spreadsheets. Enter the data gotten from each post. To identify your best performing content, sort the total engagement column in a descending order.
The best performing posts in terms of engagement show at the top of the column.
Spreadsheets that help organize your social media insights are very important in analyzing the success of your social media strategy. These insights play a keen role in giving you information about what it is you are doing right and what you are doing wrong. This helps you make decisions for your social media strategy.
A good organization of these insights in spreadsheets make it a lot easier and less messy for you to change data into actionable insights.