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.

WHAT EXACTLY ARE 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.

SPREADSHEETS EXPLAINED

A spreadsheet is a software that helps you organize, analyse and store data.

For years, spreadsheets have been essential business and accounting tools.

BENEFITS OF USING SPREADSHEETS.

• Most unique benefit of the spreadsheet is that they do most of the calculations for you.
• They help give all the mess a better sense.
• Data can be represented in whatever format you choose, grids and columns, graphs – bar charts and pie charts. With that report and presentations can be shown in whatever format the team can best work with.
• Most are free and require minimum training & expertise.
• They help you put all important related data and metrics in one place without missing anything out.
•  They give you a platform to compare and analyze the different important data and derive from them reasonable and actionable insight.

GETTING A SOCIAL MEDIA SPREADSHEET

There are two ways you can get a spreadsheet.

1. Save money by designing your own using a spreadsheet software.
2. Download an already made social media spreadsheet template.

SPREADSHEET SOFTWARES

Spreadsheet softwares allow you custom design your own report. The most popular ones being, Google Sheet, Apple Number and Microsoft Excel.

GOOGLE SHEETS

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.

• This application allows collaboration, multi users can edit and format files in real-time. Instead of emailing one document to many people for editing, a single document can be opened and edited by so many different users simultaneously.
• Google sheets include a sidebar chat feature that allows collaborators discuss edits in real-time and make recommendations on certain changes while files and projects are being worked on.
• Supported file formats include; .xlsx, .xls, .xlt, .xltx, .xltxm, .ods, .csv, .tsv
• The application supports offline editing. Users can edit and make changes to a project offline either on the desktop or mobile app.
• Google sheets can be integrated with other Google products such as Google Form, Google Finance, Google Translate and Google Drawings.

HOW TO USE GOOGLE SHEETS

Google sheets can be accessed on Chrome browser or the Google sheet app on desktop and mobile.

• Go to Google Drive dashboard, log in with a gmail account.
• Click the new button on the top left corner and select Google sheets.
• If you are accessing the Google Drive dashboard using your mobile app, click on the plus icon and select sheets.
• Open the menu bar in the spreadsheet window, click file then new. It will create a blank spreadsheet that looks like this:

MICROSOFT EXCEL

• It allows you add a header and footer to your spreadsheet document.
• It allows you protect your project by using a password.
• It allows you filter your data using one of two commands; auto filter and advanced filter. Data filtering allows you display only the rows that meet the criteria you specify for a column.
• It allows you arrange data in a logical order.
• Ms Excel allows you create different charts such as bar graph, pie-charts, line graphs and more.
• Microsoft Excel automatically edits results if changes are made in any of the cells.
• Using formula auditing, you can graphically display or trace the relationships between cells.

APPLE NUMBERS

It is a spreadsheet application created by Apple inc. it can be used on mobile iOS and desktop macOS.

• It allows you create custom templates to use as starting points for new spreadsheets across all your social media pages report.
• It allows you export files in other formats including Microsoft Excel, CSV and TSV.
• It allows you represent data in so many different formats
• You can easily jump to other sheets in your Numbers spreadsheet by creating text links.
• Allows for offline collaboration.
• It allows you group your data in ranges including; day of weeks, day, weeks, month, quarter and year.

DESIGNING YOUR OWN CUSTOM SOCIAL MEDIA SPREADSHEET

1. IDENTIFYING YOUR GOALS

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.

2. Organize your rows and columns;

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.

3. Categories and Subcategories;

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.

4. Sort your data and gain insight;

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.

KEY TAKEAWAY;

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.