The key metrics I like to keep track of and report every month are reach, impressions, followers, likes and shares. I typically only report the Instagram metrics because Facebook is more so for our older demographic and alumni, and twitter hides its analytics behind a paywall. I feel like Instagram reflects our current student body demographic the most accurately, and even in classes I have had before about social media many people reported instagram as their primary platform. I used that information to make instagram my main focus since I am in an older age bracket than most of my peers who are The Stars real target audience in my opinion.
One particular post that really showed how much our engagement and reach has grown has been our recent reporting of the two demonstrators on campus on Nov. 6th. This post was reported and up on socials about 20 minutes after the occurrence on campus. It quickly garnered over 55k views, and 2295 interactions with 1.6k likes, 67 comments and 572 shares. A record for all of our social platforms and probably our most successful story on socials and our website to date. This really illustrated for me the importance of timeliness in getting information up and out to our audience.
Using Instagram Analytics I was able to see that 72% of the people viewing and interacting with our post aren’t even our followers. Which to me meant that our quick turn around and posting time made the algorithm push out our story even further than it would have originally. This story even got picked up by a few major outlets that cited us and even further improved our engagement like snopes fact checking among others. These types of analytics are really inspiring for me and looking at the numbers every month as they continue to climb really pays off. It makes pulling over in a parking lot and using my hotspot to post a breaking news story on my laptop really feel worth it. Below I have attached two graphs showing our account reach and net follower gain per month since I took over the role as the social media manager for The University Star.