What nearly 1,000 social media posts taught us about what’s working
There’s no shortage of advice about what you should be doing on social media.
Post more video, use more carousels, try this hook, post at this time, or don’t post at that time.
But we’re far more interested in what the numbers are actually telling us.
Across the accounts we managed during our Q3 2026 reporting period, we published 982 pieces of content, generating 1.2 million views and 25,727 engagements.
We looked across the data to see what people were clicking on, engaging with and responding to, and there were some useful lessons to take into Q4.
1. Big reach isn’t everything
One of the most interesting numbers from the quarter was this:
Views fell by 32%, while engagement increased by 24.7%.
That’s a useful reminder not to judge your content purely by how many people saw it.
A post reaching 20,000 people might look impressive in a report, but if nobody clicks, comments, shares or takes another action, was it really more successful than a post reaching 2,000 of the right people?
When you review your own social media, look beyond reach and impressions and pay attention to what happened next.
2. Make the useful stuff easy to find
Sometimes the content that works best is also the simplest.
One post we created for a recruitment client clearly listing current opportunities generated more than 46,000 views and 1,084 clicks.
There was no complicated concept behind it, it simple gave people information they were actively interested in and made that information easy to access.
Think about what your own customers regularly want to know:
What does it cost?
What’s currently available?
When is the deadline?
What has changed?
How do I book, buy or apply?
What do I need to do next?
Some of that information may feel incredibly obvious when you work in the business every day, but probably isn’t obvious to your customer, so don’t bury it.
3. Give people an obvious next step
Some of the strongest posts in our Q3 data weren’t necessarily the posts with the most likes.
They were posts generating hundreds or even thousands of “invisible” clicks.
That means thinking about the purpose of your post before you create it.
Do you want someone to read an article? View a property? Look at current vacancies? Book something? Find out more about a service?
If there is a natural next step, make it easy to find and do.
It sounds simple, but it is surprisingly easy to create a post, spend ages making it look good, publish it and forget to ask what you actually wanted the person reading it to do.
4. People still like seeing people
We saw strong performance from content featuring teams, events and involvement in the local community.
One client post about its team taking part in a community event achieved a 29.9% engagement rate per reach.
Why? Because people want to see who they’re dealing with.
That doesn’t mean every post needs to feature a smiling team photo. But if your feed is almost entirely graphics, stock photography and announcements, you could probably show a little more of the real business.
Capture the event, introduce the person doing the work, or show what happened behind the scenes.
People are nosey, you may as well lean into that!
5. Not everything needs to look polished
This one is particularly easy for marketing teams to forget.
Some of our own strongest-performing GMM content was simply us documenting what we’d been doing.
One post following a GMM event generated more than 1,800 engagements.
A good photo from something that actually happened can sometimes do more than another carefully designed graphic.
That doesn’t mean quality doesn’t matter. It means not every post needs a photoshoot, a campaign idea and six rounds of design.
Keep your phone handy, capture things while they’re happening. Your day-to-day activity is probably giving you more content than you realise.
6. LinkedIn deserves attention
LinkedIn continues to be one of the strongest platforms across many of the accounts we manage.
It generated 20,973 engagements across the accounts included in our Q3 report alone.
But the bigger point is not that every business suddenly needs to start posting on LinkedIn, it’s that your audience should always come first.
If the people you want to reach are spending time there, LinkedIn is worth serious consideration, whether you sell services to other companies or products and services directly to individual customers.
The platform has moved well beyond corporate announcements and job updates. People increasingly use it to follow individuals, discover businesses, learn, discuss ideas and make buying decisions.
So don’t decide a platform is or isn’t for you based on old assumptions, look at where your actual customers are.
7. Paid helps, but the content still has to be good
Paid activity accounted for around 735,000 of our 1.2 million views during the reporting period.
But 25,105 of the 25,727 engagements were organic.
What does that mean? Simply put, paid and boosted posts can be incredibly useful for putting content in front of more people, but it can’t suddenly make an uninteresting post interesting.
Use paid activity to give good content more reach, rather than relying on advertising budget to prop up content people weren’t particularly interested in to begin with.
So what are we taking into Q4?
For GMM, our own reminder is pretty simple.
We want to create more useful content, show more real people, make the next step clearer and think properly about the platforms we’re posting on.
Most importantly, we want to spend less time talking about the business itself and more time creating content our clients actually care about.
Need support with your content?
If you’re not sure what to post, where to focus or how to turn your ideas into content that actually works, we can help.
From social media and content planning to campaigns, strategy and everything in between.
Get in touch with Ellie or Leanne today - hello@greatmindsmarketing.co.uk
