Social Media Analytics for Regional Businesses: What to Actually Measure
- Jan 30, 2025
- 3 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
By the time most workshop participants reach Week 4, something has shifted. They have built a content strategy, got comfortable with the tools, started showing up more consistently and engaged more intentionally with their community. And they are starting to wonder: is any of this actually working?
That is exactly the right question. And answering it properly is what Week 4 is about.
Analytics is the part of social media that most regional business owners either ignore entirely or misread. And the most common misreading is treating surface engagement, likes, comments and shares, as the primary measure of whether your social media is performing.
Matt Griffiths has a different view, shaped by years of managing social media for regional businesses and watching the real outcomes those businesses experience.
The problem with chasing engagement metrics
Likes and comments are visible. They are easy to count. And they feel good when they go up. But they are not the whole story, and for many regional businesses they are not even the most important part of the story.
Silent following is real and it is significant. People watch your content consistently for months without ever interacting with it publicly. They are forming a view of your business, building familiarity and trust, and when the moment is right they reach out and they come in already warm.
If you are only measuring likes and comments, this entire audience is invisible to you. The analytics tell a different story. Reach and impressions show you how many people your content is actually getting in front of, regardless of whether they interacted with it. Profile visits show you how many people liked what they saw enough to look at your page. Link clicks show you who went through to your website.
These are the numbers that connect social media to real business outcomes.
What to actually look at in your analytics
Matt walks through the specific metrics worth tracking in Week 4, and more importantly, what they mean and what to do with them.
Reach tells you how many individual accounts your content reached in a given period. This is your true audience size for that content, not just the people who liked it. For a regional business building silent following over time, watching reach grow steadily is a much more meaningful signal than watching likes fluctuate.
Impressions tell you how many times your content was shown in total, including to people who saw it multiple times. High impressions relative to reach means your content is being shown repeatedly to the same people, which is a good sign. Repeated exposure builds familiarity.
Profile visits tell you how many people visited your profile after seeing your content. This is the signal that someone liked what they saw enough to want to know more. A high profile visit rate means your content is successfully converting curiosity into interest.
Follower growth shows you whether your content is attracting new people over time. In a regional market this grows more slowly than in a mass market, but the quality of regional followers, people who are genuinely local and genuinely potential customers, tends to be significantly higher.
How to use analytics to improve your strategy
The point of analytics is not just to know how you are performing. It is to improve what you do next.
Matt covers how to identify which types of content are performing best, how to understand why, and how to adjust your content calendar to do more of what works. This is not about chasing trends or abandoning your brand voice. It is about understanding your specific audience well enough to serve them better.
He also covers how to track performance over time in a way that is meaningful for a small business, without spending hours every week in a spreadsheet.
Watch the video
The video above captures Week 4 of the workshop live, with Matt walking through analytics in Meta Business Suite and explaining what to look for and why.
Want to attend in person?
These workshops run regularly in partnership with MRFEC in Gisborne and consistently sell out. Head to our workshops page to check upcoming dates and secure your place.
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