The social media metrics worth tracking, and the ones to ignore
Platforms report more numbers than any small business can use. Reach, engagement, follower trend, profile visits, and your own best hours to post answer the questions that lead to decisions.
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Every platform hands you more numbers than you can use, and most of them describe the past without telling you what to do next. A small business needs only a few, each one answering a practical question. Are the right people seeing the posts? Are they doing anything about them? Is the audience growing?
Reach: how many accounts saw the post
Reach counts the accounts a post was shown to. It tells you whether a post got in front of people at all, before any question of whether it was good.
When a post you thought was strong gets low reach, look at the timing and the format before you rewrite the content. A great caption posted at an hour when your audience is asleep has had no real test.
Engagement: what people did about it
Engagement adds up the actions people took on a post. In eksis it is the sum of likes, comments, saves, and shares.
Look at the parts as well as the total. A save means someone wants to come back to the post later. A comment means the post gave them something to say. Both take more effort than a like, so a post with fewer likes but more saves may have done more for you.
Comparing posts with each other tells you more than any single number. Which formats get saved? Which topics get people commenting? That is the list to make more of.
Followers, read as a trend
A follower count on its own is a score, not a signal. The change from week to week tells you whether recent posts are bringing new people in.
One detail catches people out. Platforms only tell apps the current follower count, not its history. eksis records it once a day from the day you connect an account, so the growth chart starts on that day. If you want a long history later, connect your accounts early.
Profile visits: who wanted to know more
Profile visits count the people who went from a post to your profile, which is often the step before following you or tapping your link. Where a platform reports it, a post with many profile visits made people curious about the business behind it.
Find your own best time to post
Charts of the best time to post are built from other people's accounts. Your audience has its own habits, set by its time zones, jobs, and routines.
The Best hours to post view in eksis averages the engagement of your own posts by the hour they went out, so it reflects your followers rather than a general guess. Give it a few weeks of posts at different times before you trust it, because a handful of posts is too little to go on.
Numbers you can stop watching
- all-time totals, which only ever go up
- follower count without the trend
- metrics you look at every week but never act on
If a number has not changed a decision in three months, take it off your report.
Not every platform reports everything
Each platform decides what it shares with outside apps. YouTube reports dislikes, and only to the channel's owner. LinkedIn only shares post statistics with apps approved for its Community Management API, so eksis cannot show them yet. Where a platform does not report a figure, eksis marks it as not reported instead of showing zero, because a missing number is not the same as nobody reacting.
Review once a month
Pick a day each month, compare the last 30 days with the 30 before, and write down two things: what worked, and what you will try next month. Analytics in eksis compares any 7, 30, or 90-day period with the one before it, and you can export the numbers to CSV or an Excel workbook if you keep your own report.
Analytics is included from the Starter plan up. The pricing page has the details, and if you are still building a posting rhythm to measure, start with how to plan a week of posts in one sitting.
