How to Do a Content Analysis of Social Media

A social media content analysis is your secret weapon for figuring out exactly what your audience loves, what falls flat, and where your biggest opportunities for growth are hiding. Instead of guessing what to post next, you'll be making decisions backed by your own data. This guide will walk you through, step-by-step, how to analyze your content so you can stop throwing spaghetti at the wall and start building a strategy that actually works.

What Exactly Is a Social Media Content Analysis (And Why Bother)?

Think of it as a systematic review of everything you've ever posted. A social media content analysis isn't about glancing at a few posts and noting their likes. It’s a structured process of collecting data, categorizing your content, and identifying patterns to understand what truly resonates with your audience - and what doesn’t. You're moving from "I think this post did well" to "I know this type of post consistently outperforms everything else by 35%."

Why go through the trouble? A good analysis helps you:

• Understand Your Audience on a Deeper Level: Discover the topics, formats, and tones that grab their attention and spark conversation.
• Create Better-Performing Content: Double down on what works and stop wasting time on content that gets ignored.
• Refine Your Content Strategy: Build a strategy based on evidence, not assumptions, leading to more consistent growth and engagement.
• Prove Your Social Media ROI: Show stakeholders exactly what’s working and how your efforts are contributing to business goals.

Before You Begin: Set Clear Goals

An analysis without a goal is just a pile of data. Before you get lost in a spreadsheet, ask yourself: What specific question am I trying to answer? Your goal will guide your entire process, from the metrics you track to the insights you look for. Vague goals like "see what's working" aren't specific enough. Get granular.

Here are some examples of strong, clear goals:

• "Identify which of our three main content pillars (Educational, Behind-the-Scenes, Product-focused) drives the most engagement on Instagram."
• "Determine if Reels or static image carousels generate more website clicks from our LinkedIn posts."
• "Understand the overall sentiment of comments on our TikTok videos over the last quarter."
• "Find our optimal posting time by analyzing when posts receive the most reach and engagement within the first 24 hours."

Choose one or two primary goals to start. You can always run another analysis later to answer different questions.

Your Step-by-Step Guide to a Social Media Content Analysis

Ready to dig in? Here’s the play-by-play. It might seem like a lot, but taking it one step at a time makes it manageable.

Step 1: Define Your Scope

You can't analyze every post you've ever made. For your first analysis, narrow your focus to keep it from becoming overwhelming.

Choose a Timeframe

Look at a specific period. Good options include:

• The last 90 days: This is a great starting point. It gives you enough data to spot meaningful trends without being too historical. Your audience's preferences and platform algorithms change, so recent data is often the most relevant.
• A specific campaign: Analyze the content published during a recent product launch or marketing campaign to measure its performance.
• Quarter-over-quarter: Compare your last quarter's performance to the previous one to track progress and evolving trends.

Select Your Platforms

You don't need to analyze every single platform at once, especially if you have an active presence across many channels. Start with the platform that is most important to your business goals right now. If your main objective is community-building, start with Instagram. If it's lead generation, you might begin with LinkedIn.

Step 2: Collect Your Data

This is where you'll gather the raw numbers. Create a simple spreadsheet with columns for each data point. You can get this data from your native social media analytics (like Instagram Insights or TikTok Analytics) or a social media management tool. For each post within your chosen timeframe, you'll want to log both quantitative and qualitative metrics.

Quantitative Metrics (The Numbers)

These are the hard data points that tell you what happened. Pick the metrics that align with your goal.

• Reach: The number of unique accounts that saw your post.
• Impressions: The total number of times your post was seen (one person could see it multiple times).
• Engagement: Total likes, comments, shares, and saves.
• Engagement Rate: (Total Engagements / Reach) * 100. This is one of the best metrics for measuring how compelling your content is. A simple formula in your spreadsheet can calculate this for you automatically: =(LIKES+COMMENTS+SHARES+SAVES)/REACH
• Video Views: The number of times your video was played.
• Watch Time / Average View Duration: How long, on average, people watched your video.
• Clicks: How many times people clicked a link in your post or bio.
• Profile Visits: How many people visited your profile after seeing a post.

Qualitative Metrics (The Context)

These metrics tell you why something happened. This requires a more manual review but often reveals the most powerful insights.

• Comment Sentiment: Are the comments generally positive, negative, neutral, or asking questions? You can add a column in your spreadsheet and label each post.
• Comment Themes: Are people consistently asking the same questions? Tagging their friends? Sharing their own experiences? Note these recurring themes.
• Feedback: Are customers giving you direct feedback (good or bad) about your product, service, or content?

Step 3: Categorize Everything (Build Your "Codebook")

This is the most important step in the analysis. A spreadsheet full of numbers is useless until you categorize each piece of content. This allows you to group similar posts together and compare their performance. This set of categories is your "codebook."

Add new columns to your spreadsheet for each of your categories. Here are some of the most effective ways to categorize your content:

• Content Format:
  • Single Image
  • Carousel
  • Reel
  • TikTok Video
  • YouTube Short
  • Story
  • Text-Only Post
  • Infographic
  • Meme/Humor
• Content Pillar/Theme: These are the core topics you talk about.
  • Educational / How-To
  • Behind-the-Scenes (BTS)
  • User-Generated Content (UGC) Recap
  • Product/Service Feature
  • Promotional Offer / Sale
  • Company Culture / Team Spotlight
  • Inspirational / Motivational
  • Industry News / Trends
• Goal of the Post: Why did you create this piece of content?
  • Drive Website Traffic
  • Increase Brand Awareness
  • Generate Leads
  • Build Community/Engagement
  • Drive Sales
• Call to Action (CTA): What did you ask the user to do?
  • Comment Below
  • Link in Bio
  • Save this Post
  • Share with a Friend
  • Shop Now
  • No CTA

Go through your spreadsheet post by post and fill in these categories. Yes, it takes time, but this process unlocks a clear view of your strategy.

Step 4: Connect the Dots and Identify Patterns

Now the fun begins. With all your data collected and categorized, you can start analyzing. Use your spreadsheet's sorting and filtering functions to answer the goals you set at the beginning.

Look for answers to questions like:

• What was my top-performing post overall? What was my worst? What do they have in common?
• Which content format gets the highest average engagement rate? Do Reels outperform Carousels?
• Which content pillar drives the most comments and shares? Are a couple of pillars doing all the heavy lifting?
• Is there a pattern to the posts with the highest number of saves? (This often points to highly valuable, educational content.)
• Do posts with a "Question" CTA get more comments than posts with "Link in Bio"?
• Is there a specific day of the week or time of day that consistently shows higher reach?

The patterns will start to emerge. You might discover something like: "Our educational Reels get 50% more shares than any other content type, and BTS carousels drive the most profile visits." These are the golden nuggets you're looking for.

Step 5: Turn Your Insights into an Action Plan

Don't let your analysis die in a spreadsheet. The final step is to translate your findings into tangible actions that will improve your social media strategy moving forward.

Summarize Your Findings

Write down 3-5 key takeaways from your analysis. No fancy reports needed - just clear, simple statements.

Example: "Our audience responds best to educational content in video format. Promotional posts with static images have the lowest reach and engagement. Posts asking direct questions in the first line of the caption see a 75% higher comment count."

Create Actionable Next Steps

For each takeaway, determine what you are going to start doing, stop doing, or continue doing.

• Start: "We will create one more educational Reel per week and test using a question as the hook."
• Stop: "We will pause creating static promotional images and instead showcase product benefits in a carousel format."
• Continue: "We will continue to post behind-the-scenes content on Fridays, as it consistently performs well."

Schedule a follow-up analysis in 90 days to see if your changes moved the needle. And just like that, you’ve created a data-informed feedback loop that will continuously improve your social media performance.

Final Thoughts

Running a content analysis is about trading assumptions for answers. By systematically digging into your own performance data, you gain a clear understanding of what your audience actually wants, empowering you to create more effective content, build a lasting community, and grow your brand organically.

Going through this process helps you see your strategy with fresh eyes, but pulling data from multiple platforms can feel like a chore. At Postbase, we built our analytics dashboard to solve this exact problem. Seeing performance across all your accounts in one clean view makes it instantly clear which posts are hitting the mark and which aren't, so you can spend less time in spreadsheets and more time creating the content your audience is waiting for.