Tracking social media stats

[Natalie_Vijlbri]

I have been using Airtable for a while now and have quite a good grasp of how I can use it. But somehow I can’t seem to figure out how to track my different social media stats in the best way. In excel I would just have a row per stat and a column per month but that is hardly effective now, right?

Who has a show and tell for a great stats tracking base?

[David_Skinner]

Because Airtable is a database, and not a spreadsheet, the natural way to store your social media data would be to have a table of individual posts. You’d probably store the image, the caption, date posted, and the number of likes, shares, comments etc. for every post in this table. You could use filters and groups to view most of your stats within this table. Another option would be to have a Monthly Reporting table where each record is an individual month. You could link each post in the Posts table to the relevant month in the Monthly Reporting table and then roll up all of the relevant stats there to get something very similar to what you have in Excel.

[Natalie_Vijlbri]

Hmm, good point. I do have a content calendar that I could add those stats too. Might be a good idea to start :slightly_smiling_face:

But what I want to track is my total likes for my page for instance, or subscribers of my newsletter and that won’t work per post.

[Justin_Barrett]

This might not be the answer you’re seeking, but databases aren’t for everything. Maybe I just don’t understand the scope of your project, but the basic “row per stat and column per month” sounds like all you need, and a spreadsheet will probably work just fine for that. Not that it couldn’t be done in a database like Airtable, because it certainly could, but I just don’t see any huge advantages to trying to set up something like that in a database. Databases tend to be the go-to place when you’re not just tracking figures over time, but interacting with them via data in other linked tables, sorting them into custom views, etc. The impression I get so far is that the data you’re tracking is pretty basic, and it’s not quite screaming, “Airtable would make managing this data so much easier.” Right now I only see it as different.

[Natalie_Vijlbri]

Hey Justin,

Thank you for your reply. I had a really good think about it. Yes, sometimes Airtable is overkill but I do think Airtable would give me a lot more options in custom views, tracking different parts of the data etc.
It did not need to be row per stat and column per month per se, I just couldn’t figure out how else to do it… Until yesterday.
And it turned out to be really simple: just switch columns and rows. So my columns now have the data and each row (each record) is a specific month. There are 2 extra columns for month and year so the first field can be a combination of the 2 but I can also search for only 2018 or only January months.

[Justin_Barrett]

Glad to hear that you got it worked out. I’m still relatively new to the database paradigm myself, and hadn’t considered the option of swapping the rows and columns, but it sounds like a very elegant solution!

[rylanddevero]

@Natalie_Vijlbrief I am struggling with this exact issue, and got to the part where I’ve decided to switch rows/columns but am still running into problems with how I’m going to be able to easily and quickly see growth or change month-over-month. Were you able to create something that works for your team? Would you be willing to share best practices or screenshots of your setup? Thank you!

[Natalie_Vijlbri]

It’s kind of a yes and no answer. I did get it doing a lot more of what I wanted but it’s still not ideal.

Right now I just track stats per month of the year: Newsletter signups, Facebook likes etc.

[Brittney_Byus]

I followed suit and this definitely helped! It’s so much cleaner to look at. Would love to know if you have tweaked or found a way to better track growth since then? Thank you!

[Alex_Backer]

Hi everyone! I have recently bumped into this tool that helps you track all the social media at once. Has anyone tried it? Should I spend money and time on it? I’m afraid it will be just a scam. Would be very grateful if you answer me.