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Read your social reports

Goal​

See how a brand's accounts are growing and how its posts are doing, and take the numbers away as a spreadsheet.

Prerequisites​

Steps​

  1. Choose Social reports in the left-hand list, under Social.
  2. Pick the brand, and the Period: the last 7, 28 or 90 days.
  3. Read the period at a glance: posts published, impressions, reach, engagement rate, and how many followers the brand's accounts gained or lost.
  4. Followers draws one line per account, one point per day.
  5. Best posts and Weakest posts rank the period's posts by engagement rate.
  6. The table lists every post that went out in the period, newest first. Click a post's text to open it on the network. Numbers from says which collection the numbers are (see below).
  7. Choose Export posts (CSV) or Export followers (CSV) to download the same numbers as a spreadsheet.

What the numbers mean​

  • Impressions: how many times the post was shown. Reach: how many people saw it.
  • Engagements: reactions, comments, shares and clicks added together, as far as the network reports them.
  • Engagement rate: engagements divided by reach, or by impressions where a network gives no reach. Posts are ranked by the rate rather than by raw counts, so a page with more followers doesn't always win.
  • A dash means the network did not report that number. It is never shown as zero:
    • X reports impressions but not reach or clicks.
    • A LinkedIn profile (as opposed to a company page) reports no numbers to the platform.
    • Meta occasionally renames a measure, which leaves it empty until the platform catches up.

What happens behind the scenes​

Numbers are collected, not looked up. The platform asks each network for each account's followers once a day, and for each post's numbers an hour, a day, a week and four weeks after it went out. A report shows only what has been collected, so it opens at once and still works when a network is down. A post published a moment ago shows Not yet collected.

If the platform was down when a collection was due, it takes only the latest one that is due. It does not fill the earlier ones in with today's numbers, so Numbers from always tells the truth about when they were taken.

An account that needs reconnecting stops being counted until it is reconnected, because the network refuses its access. Disconnecting an account removes its follower history; its posts' numbers stay.

The CSV is written by the platform, with the same numbers and the same rates as the screen. It opens correctly in spreadsheets in every language. Text that a spreadsheet would treat as a formula is prefixed with an apostrophe, so a post can never run anything when the file is opened.

What comes next​

A PDF of a report, through the Reporting tool, is planned. Until then, the CSV is the way to take the numbers elsewhere.