5-Minute Friday | Identify Your Best Performing Posts

And recreate them

Another new year. Whether or not you believe time is real, most people use January 1st (or 2nd, as the case may be), to do a bit of reflecting and forward thinking. What worked last year? What do we want to leave behind? What do we want to carry forward? All are questions we ask ourselves in the week or so leading up to the ball dropping at midnight.

For me, as a social media manager, this looks like going into my clients’ analytics and seeing what posts performed the best and what posts performed the worst. (By the way, “performed” is subjective to your goals. A post may have had really shitty engagement, for example, but have the highest number of external link clicks of any of your other posts. If your goal for that post was to drive link clicks, then that post was a success.)

So, today’s 5-Minute task is to go through your insights on Instagram (or whatever platform you want to double down on in the new year) and look at what posts have performed well in each category you find valuable. Here are some metrics I personally like to pay attention to for my clients on Instagram:

• Accounts Reached/Reach

• Post Interactions

• External Link Taps

You may also want to look at Follows, Comments, Shares, and Views, but I find the above three the most important to my clients’ goals in general.

How to view your insights/analytics on Instagram

1. From your profile, tap the sandwich in the upper-right corner.

2. Tap “Insights” in the drop-down

   menu.

3. To look at specific content you shared last year, tap “Content You Shared.”

4. From here, you can control the data range, like time and what metric you want to look at. I recommend looking at data from the last year or even the last two years to really get an idea of what’s worked long term.

   1. Note: Some metrics aren’t available for all post types. For regular posts (like carousels and single photos), reels, and stories, you can see Views, Accounts Reached, Follows, and Shares. But, for some reason, you can only view External Link Taps and Profile visits on regular posts. You can see Interactions for Reels and Regular posts, but only if you look at those media types specifically, so you’ll have to do a bit of cross-referencing. It’s the bane of my existence when I do my analytics reports every month.

Highest Reach

Reach is the number of individual accounts that have seen a post. This is an important metric for just about any goal you have, but it’s especially important if your goal is brand awareness, because it shows which posts and post types (carousel, photo, or Reel) got out in front of the most (or least) number of people.

I like to view this one both in isolation and in comparison to the number of interactions a post has had, so I can really understand how well it has performed. Obviously, if a post got way higher reach than other posts, you’ll want to ask yourself why and see if you can replicate that. Was it the media type? The content itself? Did it get a lot of shares? Did you add music?

For Foxen, our posts with the highest reach were mostly Reels. This is unsurprising, as the entire mechanism around Reels is to get them out in front of as many people as possible. The posts that aren’t Reels, though, feature dogs or were collaboration posts with another account.

For Brave & Maiden, our highest Reach posts were pretty much all carousel posts and largely featured our team members on the covers.

Most Interactions

Although engagement (likes, comments, saves, and shares) isn’t the most important metric, it is still a helpful indicator for how well a post was recieved by the folks that have seen it. If you want to go a level deeper, you can also look at most comments and most shares as two individual engagements that are most impactful. To me, it matters less how many “likes” a post has because that’s the lowest hanging fruit. I have found that posts that get a lot of shares and comments often have the most reach and overall interactions.

You'll notice that for foxen the most interacted reels correlate to the highest reach. But you'll also see that carousels and reels perform about the same in terms of engagement. So, if our goal is reach + engagement, then we want to focus on making more Reels. But if our goal is simply to engage more people, then we could share either Reels or Carousels.

For Brave & Maiden, we found early on that this audience prefers carousels over Reels, which is why Carousels are prioritized. You'll see that our most engaged with posts are Carousels to a significant degree.

External Link Clicks

A lot of wineries express that online wine sales are an important goal, so it stands to reason that we want to also look at link clicks as a metric. Please note, though, that unfortunately, we can only track link clicks connected to regular posts like carousels and photos, as Reels don’t give us that data at this time. So, if you have a Reels-heavy strategy, then you might not get the data you want. That said, I’d still recommend looking at it because it can be enlightening.

For Foxen, you’ll see our posts with the most link clicks are varied. Some bottle shots, but mostly they include photos of people alongside wine, or not even showing bottles.

For Brave & Maiden, you’ll once again see a correlation between which posts had the most reach and engagement, and which posts had the most link clicks. They mostly feature people or experiences, but there are a few bottle shots sprinkled in there.

If you’re feeling extra

So now that you have this information, what can you do with it? If you’d like to take an additional five minutes, I’d recommend taking the top performing post across a single category (or, if you’re like Brave & Maiden and find that the top performing post is the same across the categories, use that one), and trying to recreate it.

Your audience has given you valuable information about what they want to see. Listen to them!

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