Using Insights and Focus Goals Without Burnout

by Ret David North

Social interaction is constantly evolving, especially as our phones and electronics develop new ways for us to connect with one another. For most of us, it feels disingenuous, awkward, and even rude for us to quantify social interaction and community dynamics, because it takes our mindsets away from the people involved. As communicators, this can lead to frustration and burnout as we are led away from our big-picture goal of bringing people together, or worse, away from ourselves.

As communicators, our biggest strengths and our greatest weakness is remembering that we are people, too; we are more than our job descriptions, more than our accomplishments, and more than any amount of work we put in. This can be hard to grapple with when social media comes into play, because those metrics and insights which quantify your community’s engagement with your work and with each other can make us feel like we are not doing enough.

Today, let’s talk about how we can use metrics and insights in a way that helps us focus on our goals without falling into burnout.

What are insights? What do I need to know?

The best insights to use are the ones that will most directly tell you how well and how often you are connecting with their community, what content your community engages with the most, and what you can do to get your content to as many people in your community as possible. Most platforms, FaceBook and Instagram especially, can show you an overwhelming number of metrics in way too many misleading categories. Here are the metrics you should monitor regularly:

1. Number of followers and/or likes over time
   While this number has the potential to be stressful, most of what you need to know comes either when you are first starting or when you are preparing your annual report. Understanding your community’s congregation/member numbers, visitor numbers, and more is important so that you have a number to compare to.

   Depending on the circumstances, this insight does not necessarily need to worry you. In many communities, the primary demographic is people over the age of 65, many of whom might not have device/internet access or, if they do, they might not fully understand how it works or why it could be useful to them. This is okay! While there is increasing pressure for anyone and everyone to have social media presence, it is not necessary to maintain a thriving and loving community.

2. Reach (number of viewers reached, reactions/engagements/shares)
   Understanding who (in a general sense) your content is reaching and what types of content receive the best and/or most responses from your community can help to ease your burden, rather than making social media work more stressful for you.

   • Overview
     Your reach overview can give you an idea of how many of your community members are seeing your posts, how people tend to engage with your posts (or, in some cases, with social media in general), and how often people outside of your community and their following get to see your content.

     It is important to pay attention to this insight on algorithm-based platforms, like FaceBook and Instagram, because that can show you how well the algorithm is working for you. This gives you the opportunity not only to determine how better to reach your community, but also how better to engage with these platforms so that they work for you. In this way, it is also important to note that not every platform works for every community! Some communities may do better on Instagram than they do on FaceBook, or vice versa, and some may do better sticking with just a website. Understood correctly, your general reach insights can help you to eliminate unnecessary work with platforms that will not accomplish what you need.

   • Posts (itemized)
     This insight is a more detailed understanding of your reach and can be used to help you determine what content your community prefers to engage with. This can be a tricky insight to appreciate because of how most people interact with social media today. Social media is what app developers like to call “idle entertainment,” meaning we engage with it most when we have a few minutes in between where we are “bored” and looking for stimulation. The important thing to understand from there is that there will always be viewers who just scroll. Your engagement and reaction metrics will most likely be lower than your total reach, since there will always be viewers who see your posts but do not interact with them. Do not let this frustrate you! We would all love for every single person who sees our posts to put a reaction, put a comment, and share, but everyone interacts with social media in their own ways; all you can control is the content that gets put out.

   • When your “fans” are online
     All you really need to know from here is when to post content so that people will see it! Remember that you have the option on most platforms to schedule posts ahead of time, so take advantage of this insight (as we try with other insights) to minimize your workload and any stress that comes with it.

Focus Goals

Whether you are establishing and developing new platform presence for your community, or you are taking over a pre-established platform, it is important to set goals so social media work is not overwhelming for you or your viewers. This can be a stressful process before you even get started, but with the right mindset, setting three specific, realistic, and foreseeable goals can be the first step to successful platform presence.

Some things to consider when setting goals, especially with insights and metrics in mind:

1. (repeat after us) I cannot control the exact numbers in my insight reports, nor can my community. Therefore, these numbers do not define the success, affinity, or depth of my work or my community.

2. Consider three things this platform has the potential to do that could benefit your community.

3. Consider three things this platform has the potential to do that could negatively affect your community.

4. Qualify (do not quantify): What would you like to achieve with this presence in the next three months? Six months? Year?

5. How does this platform need to represent my community? Are there ministries or subgroups that need presence on this platform? If so, how often? What would they like to achieve with this presence?

6. Write down a tentative list of five goals for your work on this platform, then share the list with a colleague or friend outside of your community. This can help you to understand how achievable and/or productive these goals are for you and your community.

This work gets stressful, and it is important to remember the tools we have available to us to minimize this stress by easing our workload and reevaluating as needed. If something is causing you and/or your community excessive stress, it might be a good time to step back and reassess how well that part of your work is serving you, and what you can do to make things a little easier. You’ve got this!