Where Are My Social Media Followers From?
As a small business owner, there’s so much to become acquainted with when it comes to social media – from learning how to make the most of each platform’s unique features to analyzing how well a particular post has performed.
For continuous growth on social media, you need to be able to understand every aspect of the platform, which includes knowing where exactly your social media followers have come from.
Whether it’s through paid ads, organically, friends, your expanded network, or local communities, knowing how exactly these followers came to your profile can help you understand where you need to focus your efforts to attract more of the same.
Let’s take a look at how you can find out this crucial information from the three big social media players: Facebook, Instagram, and Tik Tok.
According to Oberlo, Facebook is currently the market leader of social media, with 68% of American adults admitting that they’re active on the platform. But where are your business’ Facebook Page followers coming from?
You can actually easily find out all about the people who follow your page by completing the below steps:
- Click “Insights” at the top of your Page
- Select “Followers” in the left-hand column
- View information about the number of followers, unfollows over time, and where your follows occurred
You can also learn more about the people who follow your page in terms of gender, age, location and language by clicking “Insights,” “People” and then “Your Followers.”
Following closely behind Facebook, according to Hootsuite, Instagram boasts over a billion users per month. However, unfortunately, information about your followers on this platform isn’t as easy to uncover.
Where are my social media followers from on Instagram? Well, if you have an Instagram Business account, you can find out where your followers location, age, gender, and the usual times they’re online. To do this, simply check out the “Insights” tab under the three horizontal lines icon when you click on your profile.
That said, you can only figure out which posts and ads have brought you more followers in one of two ways:
- By manually monitoring your follower count before and after each one
- By looking up each individual post or ad’s insights
There are also tools you can use to assess a specific hashtag’s performance, such as SproutSocial or Owlmetrics.
TikTok
Lastly, according to Oberlo, there are currently 500 million global monthly active users on Tik Tok.
Although on TikTok, similar to Instagram, there is only limited information available to understand exactly where your Tik Tok followers came from.
However, you can find the following analytics by switching to a Pro account:
- Profile overview, which includes total video views, profile views, and follower count
- Content insights, where you can dive deeper into each post in terms of engagement, audience territories, and whether the source of traffic is the “For You” or “Following” page
- Followers data, which shows your audience gender split and location
You can also use a program like Pentos to measure the performance of a hashtag and whether it’s worth hopping on a particular hashtag trend to gain more followers.
The Takeaway
Analytics can be a powerful tool to help you grow your audience on any social media platform. You just need to pay attention to what’s working and what isn’t to maximize your follower count, engagement, and—ultimately—your sales.
