Wendy Day shows how to read Instagram analytics across Content, Activity, and Audience tabs, then walks through Spotify, Apple Music, and other platforms. She ranks her posts by shares and engagement, noting that a Will Smith quote outperformed posts on taxes and accounting. She advises creators to study what resonates on each platform and make more of it.
Chapters
Hey, Wendy Day here again. So on everything that you do, um, every social media account that you have, any digital ads that you place, um, anything that you're doing online, any of your music at Spotify, Apple Music, SoundCloud, YouTube, you want to check the dashboards and you want to see exactly what is going on with your music. So, um, that's what I'm doing here right now. Gangster and I are over here checking everything out, looking to see what's going on, um, with my, um, lovely, uh, Instagram account for Rap Coalition for the 2020 Vision Series. So here is my Instagram account. And I am checking out to see like what all the different stats are. Now what I did was prior to, um, filming this, I did screenshots of the stuff that mattered most to me. So that's what I'm going to look for right now. And where are my screenshots? There they are. Okay, so I wanted to see what's going on exactly with my account, um, this is based on the past year. This is also based on shares. I wanted to see, okay, of all of my posts over the past year, what are people sharing the most? And that's important to me because when somebody is sharing something that I'm posting on my Instagram, it means they think enough of it to show it to one of their friends. So that means the post has value. And the funny thing is, the largest post was an inspirational post that I posted last week of Will Smith talking about following your dreams and not paying attention to anybody who says you're crazy for it. And then I wanted to check and see, okay, which of my posts in— and I did the past 30 days because I've been running the 2020 Vision series since January 1st. And since I can't just look at the past 2 weeks, I had to go back as far as a month. And I wanted to see, okay, based on the comments that my videos are getting, which ones are performing the best. And you can see the numbers here, it shows them in order. And then you guys may have noticed that every time I post a video, I'm wearing a different pair of glasses. That wasn't actually me showing out, that was me being able to figure out what which videos, just by looking at them, um, are they. That way I didn't have to go in and watch the videos to figure out, okay, what am I talking about. Um, here are my videos based on the past 30 days for engagement. That's the ones that, um, people are actually engaging with. Then here are the videos for the past 30 days, and this is based on impressions. This is the number of, this is the amount of reach, but the reach that people are actually seeing, not just reach based on how many are being shown. I look at that later, okay? In fact, here it is now, here's the reach. These are the stats for the past 30 days on how many people, how many Instagram accounts has this gotten in front of? Like, what is the total amount of people that could have seen it. So that's basically, um, what I wanted to know. And as you can see, the same handful of videos are the most popular. So what that tells me is what I should add more of. If I scroll down and saw like what performs the worst, I would know what to do less of. And I already know that, um, from doing a video series a year and a half ago, I that the videos that perform the worst are the ones that talk about accounting and paying your taxes and the stuff that most artists just really don't want to hear. And that doesn't mean that I'm not gonna talk about that stuff because that stuff is really important. It means that I'm going to include it in with the more popular topics. Like, for example, touring and how to get a record deal are the two most topic— the most popular topics that I talked about in the series that I did a year and a half ago. So now that I know that, when I do the touring and the how to get a record deal topic, I know that I can mention maybe some tax stuff in there or accounting stuff, like stuff that you guys aren't gonna click on and check out because you find it boring I can then go and add in and try to make it a little more interesting by talking about in the topics that you will check out. So all this to say, in your Instagram feed, you want to go in and check your stats and figure out, okay, what's performing well, what's not, and what should I do more of, what should I do less of, and and how can I, um, maximize what I'm talking about and what I'm doing. So, um, that's really important, guys. You've gotta, you've gotta really go in and see. I'm not doing any promotions on this campaign. My attitude is kind of like, if you don't know about it and I'm giving you free knowledge and, and you haven't discovered it on your own, then, you know, shame on you, right? I'm not going to pay to give people free information. That's kind of hustling backwards. But what I am willing to do is show you how to best check on the stuff that you're doing on your own accounts. Go into content, go into activity, go into audience. You just saw me go there. You see how I did it? Wow, maybe you didn't. Maybe I really screwed that up. Um, but go into your, your stats. You can see, um, here's content, there's activity, there's your audience. This is all the information that you need to know in order to find out who your market is on Instagram. And you can do this at every platform. Like, Instagram is not the only platform that you should be doing this at. You should be doing this on your Spotify Artist— Spotify for Artists account, your, your, um, Apple Artist account, Tidal, SoundCloud, YouTube, any account that's offering you— Twitter, um, any account that's offering you a dashboard where you can go in and do the research, you should be doing that. It just makes perfect sense to know What are your fans engaging with? What are they not engaging with? You should do more of what they like and less of what they don't like. Or in, you know, the case of what I'm doing, I'm not willing to not give you tax information. I'm not willing to not talk about accounting. So I'm just going to give you that information along with the topics that you want more of, like touring and how to get a record deal. Okay, y'all, hope that was helpful.
