Most business owners we talk to don't actually know what to look at when it comes to their social media. They know something is supposed to be happening. They just don't know what that something is or how to find it.
So they either assume it's working because they've been posting, or they assume it's not working because they haven't gotten a direct message from someone saying "I found you on Instagram and I want to hire you." Neither of those is a reliable way to measure anything.
Here's how we actually think about it.
The first thing we look at is reach. Not likes, not followers, reach. How many people are actually seeing your content every month. If that number is growing over time, even slowly, your content is getting in front of new people. That matters more than whether any individual post performed well.
The second thing is profile visits. When someone sees your post and taps through to your profile, they're curious about you. They want to know more. That's a warm signal. If your profile visits are going up it means your content is doing its job, which is making people want to learn more about your business.
The third thing is saves and shares. Not likes. Likes are easy and they mean almost nothing. When someone saves your post it means they found it useful enough to come back to. When they share it they're putting you in front of their own audience. Those two actions tell you a lot more about whether your content is landing.
But we also ask the questions that go beyond the app. Are you getting more inquiries through your website? Have new clients mentioned they found you on social? Is there more foot traffic than there was six months ago? Those are the real numbers. The ones that actually connect to your business growing, not just your account growing.
What we tell every client is this. Stop checking your follower count every day. It will drive you crazy and it doesn't tell you anything useful in the short term. Follower growth is slow and it should be, because what you want is the right followers, not just more of them.
The real question isn't whether your numbers are big. It's whether they're moving in the right direction over time. Three months of steady growth in reach and profile visits, even modest growth, tells us a lot more than one post that went semi-viral and then nothing.
Social media works slowly and then all at once. The businesses that stick with it long enough to see that shift are the ones who stopped measuring the wrong things early on.
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