26: Utilizing Metrics to Improve Engagement
with Andrew Ousley
How do you know what is worth sharing and what makes for a compelling story or a compelling presence?
Well, so to me, the-- if, if it starts with story and voice, and then the next stage of social media is content and execution, what you post and how you post it, there's also-- it's incredibly important to understand the evaluation and the optimization of that posting. And looking at the metrics, the analytics, the data, is something that every artist must do. And for Instagram, you have to have a business account or an artist account to get access to that. Facebook, Twitter, have incredibly powerful analytics. But really the things that matter for an artist, because there's a million things you can look at that's a bit overwhelming, but what really matters to an artist is your follower growth, what drives people to come to you and just to decide to stay with you, and then the engagement.
What percentage of your following engages with you, and in what way? Do they like something? Do they share it? Do they comment on it? And different types of content will cause different engagements, but understanding what your average engagement rate is, is hugely important, and, are posts meeting that or surpassing it or falling below it? Those two things alone are the most important metrics you can learn as an artist.
Things like your demographic: where they are, when they're online, when they're on social platforms. Those, those are important pieces of info and you can-- they can help you post at the best times, etc., although it's certainly not gospel what they say, but, but I think just as a general indicator, but, but understanding those metrics is hugely important. So when you're scrolling through both your feed and other people's feeds, you want to look at how many followers they have. But more important ultimately than that number is how many followers are actually engaging
Kellogg:
Engaging.
Ousley:
…with their content.
Kellogg:
So in deciding the kinds of things to share, the kind of content to create, following the feedback is a key way of not only discovering what may be is authentic or worth sharing, but also what your audience really wants to see in here.
Ousley:
Absolutely. Because you're trying to build a community and a community that responds to you. And so part of the work of social media is, for an artist, is adapting to what they actually respond to. And, by-- the only way you do that is by looking at the numbers and understanding. For instance, like, I've had an artist where they love landscape photography and they're great at it, and they would post landscape photographs on their Instagram, beautiful images.
When we looked at the grid and we looked at the engagement, every single one of them was consistently, without fail, underperforming the average engagement level. So the point there is, Okay, are you trying to be a landscape photographer? No, you're trying to be an artist.