How Analytics Give You The PERFECT Social Media Strategy

You’re going to find lots of blog articles that will give you a summary of the different kinds of analytics you can find on your social accounts.

Those are great if you’re just starting out, but if you want more in-depth information and actual steps on how to improve your social by using analytics, read this entire article.

I’ll be going through the actual nitty gritty calculations and decision making that I use for my business’s social media.

Using these techniques, I built my account to over 10,000 followers in a month, and get an average of 80,000 views per video.

Analyzing analytics will improve your social media strategy by giving you clear guidelines on how to improve your content. By understanding your engagement rate and average watch time, you’ll be able to pivot your current content creation until it passes the algorithm test.

Make Sure You Understand The Engagement Rate Formula

Engagement rate is the most overall important analytic for you to track. Here’s a formula that explains how you can calculate yours.

Engagements are the total number of people that liked, commented, saved, or shared your content.

However, not all engagements are equally important.

Use An Un-Blended Engagement Rate For Deeper Insights

After you understand engagement rate, I encourage you to look at your specific engagement rates.

I’ll be using The Idea Galaxy‘s TikTok account to show you what this looks like.

The graph below tracks three types of engagement rate: Like %, Save + Comment % (blended), and how many followers each video gave me.

This is a brand new account, and the following data shows these engagement rates for the first 27 videos ever posted on this account.

The first statistic I encourage you to look at is the views. You can see that each video got almost the exact same number of views, somewhere around 200 views.

TikTok tests your videos by showing each one to around 200 people. Based on how well it performs with them, the algorithm will decide to promote your content by showing it to more people, or to stop showing it completely. If you want to grow your account past the 200 view limit, you’ll have to adjust your content to fit the algorithm better.

Once you’ve taken a look at the views on the above graph, check out the Like %. Unless you’ve made content that people are getting mad at and you’re being ratioed, your likes or hearts will always be the biggest part of your content.

What % likes per view you get will depend on the platform, and right now TikTok far outperforms every other platform in terms of organic engagement.

Understand What A ‘Good’ Like Percentage is On TikTok

The next obvious question is: what’s a good like percentage on TikTok? Remembering that all social media platforms purposefully keep these numbers secret, vague, and constantly changing, let’s try to answer that question.

Here are what some trusted authority figures are saying.

• Adobe says 4-18%
• Hootsuite says 4.5-18%
• BeProfit says 10%

A good like percentage is on TikTok is often quoted as 1:10, or 10% of viewers liking a video. However, because of platform saturation, like percentage is becoming less important. Comment, save, and share percentage, as well as watch time average are much more important for viral success.

When I started my first TikTok account in 2022, like percentage was a useful tool in determining which of my videos went viral.

However, with my business account in 2023, you can see that the algorithm is no longer giving much weight to like percentage.

Let’s take a look at my week 1 like percentage:

In week 1, I published 12 videos. Right off the bat, 7 out of 12 of my videos had 10% like percentage or higher (marked green). You’d think, as I did, that because of this, TikTok would start giving a few of my videos more views.

Even though my account was brand new, that’s actually an advantage to the TikTok algorithm, they try to do everything they can to give brand new users a chance to go viral.

So because none of my videos got very many views, I made it my goal in week 2 to increase the like % in my videos.

Let’s take a look at my week 2 like percentage:

In week 2, I published 15 videos. All but 2, or 13 out of 15, had a higher like percentage than 10%.

Additionally, 6 out of 15 had a like percentage of 15% or above, 3  out of 15 were 20% or above, and I actually got one video to be above a 25% like percentage, something even my videos with millions of views don’t have.

From week 1 to week 2, my like percentage increased from week 1 = 9.9% to week 2 = 16%.

As you can see by the total number of views, increasing my like percentage 62% from week 1 to week 2 did absolutely nothing to increase my views.

I’ve found a few people online saying that you need 40-50% engagement for the algorithm, and while sure, getting this much engagement would certainly push your video out, I don’t know how realistic I find it. I feel confident that regularly hitting over 20% and not seeing any increase in views means I’ve done enough research into seeing if like % was my problem.

Does this mean that like % is completely meaningless? No, I don’t think so. I think the fact that I increased my like percentage probably does mean that the people who saw my videos in week 2 did enjoy them more than the people that saw my week 1 videos.

However, it does mean that it’s at least a possibility for you to increase your average like percentage to a point where it’s way higher than what trusted authorities say you need, and to get absolutely no benefits from it.

I’ll still be monitoring average like %, but for the next few months it won’t play into my growth strategy.

Save + Commenting %’s

The next types of engagement are save + commenting %. This is not a standardized type of analytic, engagement rate is almost always blended to include likes as well.

In the future I’ll be making content designed to get more saves and comments, but to be perfectly frank, it’s hard to optimize for those things with such low views without being an edge lord.

A surefire way to get more comments is to make people mad, or to say something factually incorrect so that you’re corrected in the comments. With only 200 views per video, it makes sense that I’m only getting a couple comments if any per video, so I’m going to worry about these factors once I have more views.

Start Paying Attention to Average Watch Time

So how do I plan on increasing my views on TikTok? The real answer is constant iteration and a devotion to not quitting, but the answer for the next few weeks is to focus on average watch time, which is closely related to video length and % of viewers that watched the entire video.

Let’s take a look at my stats so far:

Watch time analytics weren’t being tracked in the first part of week 1 which is why they’re not shown here, but you can see that from the data I do have, my average watch time is 43%.

My next mission was to find out if that was considered good or not. From my research, I found this general summary:

A good average watch time on TikTok is 50-120% depending on how long the video length is. For videos 10s and under, it’s ideal if they loop, creating an average watch time of over 100%. If your video is closer to a minute long, 50-80% may be enough for it to get a significant number of views.

Although this article is only talking about very short videos and is from 2020 and (thus ancient in terms of TikTok), here is the most concrete guide I could find:

Although my videos with millions of views typically have a full watch of around 25%, so I think these numbers are pretty extreme, I can appreciate that my new business account does not have the best watch times.

Only a few of my videos have an average watch time of over 50%, and those are the shortest videos. Additionally, the percent of people that fully watched my videos isn’t the most either.

In the next few weeks, I’ll be focusing on this metric, and attempting to increase both my average watch time and my full watch percentage.