Why marketers need to look back to move forwards

If you do one thing this week, make it…. auditing your organic social media 

Why? 

Because you can’t increase engagement on your content and start turning that engagement into action if you don’t know what your audience responds best to, and therefore what you should be focusing on. I’m talking topic, creative and format - what makes your audience click? 

How? 

  • Pick a platform you're active on, and go into your analytics: for Facebook and Instagram activity this is the Insights tab in Meta Business Suite, for LinkedIn and X it’s the analytics tabs, for YouTube its the Google ads dashboard. 

  • Select the last 3 months as a time period (unless you’re posting very infrequently, this should give you a good overview of what’s been happening)

  • Filter your results by reach and take a look at your top 10 results. Note down the topic covered, the format (video, single image, stat, quote etc) and any particular creative features that jump out at you.

  • Go back and filter your content by likes / reactions, and again jot down the key topics and formats and any particular creative features

  • Repeat one more time by filtering by comments received 

    NOTE: Not all platforms will let you filter by all of these, but the key is to analyse reach and engagement in whichever way the platform allows.

  • Now you have breakdowns of your top 10 posts, you're looking for patterns. What do those top 10 posts for each category have in common - are the majority video? Does your audience tend to comment on case-study-type posts, but not on stat-based posts? Do they respond better to long posts or short snappy ones? 

  • Repeat for any other platforms you post on.

What now?

Now you know what your audience responds best to, it’s time to make sure your content plan for the coming quarter is prioritising the formats and topics you know get you the best results. If video drives reach and engagement, for instance, could you turn static images into reels to make them work harder for you? Or could you take beneficiary quotes and animate them? The possibilities are endless once you know what to focus on.

Alex Broniewski