How Do I Get To Know My Own Brand Better?

How do we measure and evaluate our social media accounts and content? With much of society consumed by statistics on likes, retweets, comments, shares, etc. how do people evaluate the meaning of their content?

 This is going to look different for users who are posting and sharing content for themselves and their friends/family, those who are posting content to support themselves and their lives, and those who manage said social media accounts, along with people who don’t have any social media presence at all.

 For the purpose of research, I am going to be focusing on how the industry measures performance and the platforms used to share this knowledge with the creators along with the general public.

 Before you present yourself to an audience you need to ask yourself, who am I aiming to serve versus who am I actually serving. This is important because this will show you if you might need to be doing more of one thing or less of one thing depending on the demographic that your content is being catered to.

 On the surface, users of Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, etc. are able to see how many likes, shares, retweets, and comments posts have. This is something that oftentimes is mistaken for success. There are many people who think likes = money when in fact, engagement and reach might amount to be what someone is more interested in. Referencing my past experience as a social media account coordinator, when we offered brand deals to influencers, it often was not their follower count or their like count that secured them the deal, it was the reach and the number of impressions that their posts had the potential to receive.

 Because social media is becoming a career for more and more people today, people have developed platforms such as Later, Buffer, Hootsuite that provide 24/7 analytics on posts and overall clientele base. These platforms show a brand’s reach, impression rate, demographic breakdown, likes, comments, and truly anything that a brand might need to know to be the most successful. Tools like these are essential not only for the brand owners’ knowledge about who they are serving but for the people that are trying to do business with them. They now have a tangible way to prove that they are worthy of the amount that they are charging. On the flipside, brands can pull out these statistics and say, “ya know, we just don’t think that it would be in our best interest to work with you on this project because we are looking for an account that reaches a larger audience.” which is appropriate because they now have the analytics to back up what they are deciding.

 What was once seen as a super complex idea is becoming easier to pick however, if social media was easy, everyone would be doing it. Ultimately these analytics show users what they are doing well, what their audience enjoys, and what maybe didn’t go over so well. Analytics are necessary for everything but especially in social media!