01-07-2026
Since the early 2000’s, social media has proliferated into diverse platforms that reach beyond connections with friends and colleagues. Dozens of platforms, each appealing to different audiences, have become must-have tools for brands and organizations. It’s now rare to find an organization that isn’t active on at least one platform. With each platform offering its own set of analytics, it’s hard not to drown in data. When it comes to teasing out actionable insights, where does one start?
The smartest place to start is with your KPIs, or key performance indicators. These are the specific goals that give meaning to the numbers on your screen. We love vanity metrics – impressions, reach, engagements – but what do vanity metrics actually tell us? Let's break down the most important metrics and address how to turn your data into insights that drive strategy.
Impressions and reach are where we see the biggest numbers. Impressions tell you how many times your post was seen, while reach tells you how many unique accounts saw your post. If a single person looks at your post five times, it counts as one single reach but five impressions.
Engagements offer the clearest signal of whether or not your content is resonating with your audience. At the same time, each type of engagement can tell a different story, revealing how and why people are interacting with your content.
A “reaction” means someone saw it, read it, and felt strongly enough about it to share their emotions. Most reactions are simply “like,” but with Facebook’s different emotional reactions, you can better gauge how they feel. If someone comments on your post, that tells you their feelings are strong enough that they want others to know how they feel about it. It also means they want to join the conversation and possibly come back to it another time.
The more important engagement is “sharing.” If someone shares your post to their page, that shows you that they may relate to it and that they want their network to also see your content. Link clicks that take the user away from the social media platform are another important piece of engagement: they let you know the viewer is willing to leave the platform to engage with you.
Understanding engagement rates can give you a quick look at how your content is performing. Engagement rate measures the percentage of people who interact with your content through likes, comments, saves, shares and other actions. A common way to calculate it is (total engagements ÷ total impressions) × 100. This metric helps you understand how well your content is resonating with your audience.
These KPIs help you analyze how far your content is going and how your audience reacts to it. If you have a high number of impressions but a low number of engagements, it might mean the content isn’t resonating with your audience. However, if you notice your impressions aren’t as high, but your engagement is staying the same or increasing, that means the audience you’re reaching is interested in what you have to say.
One KPI alone won’t give you the full picture. Looking at your data holistically helps you understand what’s actually happening and shape the story you want to tell. That includes paying attention to audience demographics. Knowing where your audience is active — and how they interact — helps you make smarter decisions about where to focus your effort.
You may find that your audience behaves differently on each platform, so knowing who your audience is on each platform will help guide your strategy. Think about your behavior as a user: Do you check Facebook in the morning before getting out of bed? Do you use your lunch break to scroll through LinkedIn? While you’re lying in bed at night, are you watching videos or reading articles? Understanding how you consume content can help when you’re assessing your audience’s behaviors and how they respond to certain content.
If you’re wondering where to start when it comes to your social media strategy, using your analytics to benchmark your progress is a great first step. For example, the Daniels School of Business’ Instagram has an average engagement rate of 3.8% (compared to an Instagram higher education-average engagement rate of 2.43%, according to Sprout Social). Knowing that, we can look at analytics to see what posts are performing below or above the average engagement rate and use that knowledge to guide what or how we publish in the future.
Reviewing analytics too frequently can lead to fatigue and provides only a narrow snapshot of performance. With social media algorithms constantly changing, it’s difficult to predict when a post will be seen — it may surface the same day or weeks later. While month-over-month comparisons are the most common way to assess performance, a more complete story emerges when we evaluate trends across quarters and the full year. Each annual review provides a fresh set of benchmarks to guide future goals and decision-making.
By looking over the data you have access to, you can find what topics are resonating, if images or videos perform better, or if it’s worth linking to an article. Knowing what works for your social media audience, rather than bending to what others are doing, gives you the power to shape your brand while tailoring it to your audience.
Morgan Campbell is an associate director of marketing and head of social media at the Daniels School of Business. She leads undergraduate marketing and enrollment strategy for the school, focusing on digital engagement and brand storytelling. Campbell recently presented “From Fragmented to Focused: Aligning Strategy, Voice, and Identity Across Every Touchpoint,” at a Social Media Strategies Summit. She mentors Marketing & Communications interns.
