Lindsey Komson

Featured image by Ivan Samkov

Social media metrics are more than just numbers that show you how well a post is performing. They’re a gateway into understanding your audience, your brand, and how a brand can be successful on social media.

If done right, analyzing metrics can help a brand develop a strong organic social media strategy. Let’s take a look at an example:

Planet Fitness

Planet Fitness is one of the largest fitness center companies in the United States. Its mission is “to enhance people’s lives by providing an affordable, high-quality fitness experience in a welcoming, non-intimidating environment.”

Planet Fitness has a very active Facebook presence, so I utilized BuzzSumo to analyze its organic Facebook performance over the past calendar year. In total, between 2/2/24 and 2/2/25, Planet Fitness posted 145 times, garnered 71,814 engagements, and averaged 495 engagements per post.

Key Trends/Insights

Using BuzzSumo’s Facebook Page Analyzer, I examined the Analysis Report to understand the page’s strengths and areas for improvement. Here’s what I found:

Community matters

While March 2024 was one of the months with the fewest posts, it was a huge outlier in terms of engagements. This post, featuring 4 happy Planet Fitness members, gathered over 1300 likes and 1200 comments, showing that people appreciate it when a company acknowledges their business and loyalty. Planet Fitness also replies to many of the comments, expressing their appreciation for their members who engage online.

Timing is everything

According to the “Average engagement by time published” graph, it’s clear that 4:00pm is the best time to post on Facebook. Posts shared at that time have an average engagement of 1300. From reading many comments, it seems like a large portion of PF’s online community are early risers, so after a long day of workouts and going to work, it’s likely that these members will engage online in the afternoon.

Giveaways are still relevant

The “Average engagement per post type” graph shows that giveaways are far and away the most engaging content type of everything Planet Fitness shares on Facebook. Maybe it’s the fact that not everyone feels they can afford a gym membership, but giveaways are amassing almost double the engagement of the next-best content category (Links).

Pop culture always wins

From the past calendar year, the two most-engaged with posts are pop culture references. Planet Fitness’ most successful post was on April 19^th, the day that Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poet’s Department was dropped. Using a reference to her song “Down Bad” and encouraging users to engage with the post if they relate was the perfect storm for PF’s Facebook account.

The second-most successful post dropped the day after Beyoncé released her first country single, “Texas Hold ‘Em.” Planet Fitness posted a purple bejeweled cowboy hat with the caption “brb adding new line dancing workouts to the PF app.” It’s funny, relevant, and still reminds users that there are workouts available on the Planet Fitness app to do at any time. Perfect execution.

Organic Strategy

In Social Media ROI: Managing and Measuring Social Media Efforts in Your Organization by Olivier Blanchard, he explains that “having a ‘presence’ in social media is worthless unless you do something with it.” Based on the metrics I detailed plus some others from the report, I pinpointed a few key strategies to enhance Planet Fitness’ organic social media presence:

• User-Generated Content (UGC) is an extremely important part of any company’s social media strategy. Regularly incorporating member photos, stories, testimonials, and experiences into the social media strategy will show prospective members that this is a positive environment where people of all shapes, sizes, colors, and backgrounds can work to better themselves.
• Posting at 4pm will keep the content relevant and on users’ screens. The article “Everything you need to know about social media algorithms” from Sprout Social emphasizes that high engagement is key for having algorithms share a brand’s content to more users. If Planet Fitness’ posts are getting the most engagement at 4pm, continuing with this posting time will allow the content to end up on more feeds in the future.
• Giveaways will continue to bring in a new member base solely from social media engagement. Offering memberships, swag, training sessions, and more will create buzz around the PF account while driving conversions.
• Staying up to date on pop culture will keep an already-engaged audience around and attract new eyes from all fandoms alike. Even if a user doesn’t belong to a specific fandom, seeing a brand relate to current events lets people know there are real humans behind this brand.

Analyzing metrics can help inform an organic content strategy. This example of Planet Fitness’ Facebook account clearly shows how a brand can build a following and boost engagement by understanding online and audience behaviors.