Use Funnel and Google Data Studio to track total followers and the number of followers gained or lost each day across your organic social channels. These metrics help you compare follower trends with your social media activity.
Before you begin
Connect each organic social connector that you want to include.
Select the report type that contains the total follower metric:
Facebook Pages: Page Non-aggregatable Insights Report.
LinkedIn Organic: Total Followers Reports.
X Organic: User Insights report.
Instagram Insights: Audience lifetime report.
YouTube: Channel insight report.
Allow Funnel to collect follower data over time. Funnel starts collecting total follower values when you connect the data source. The connector APIs do not provide historical values from before that date.
Confirm that you can create custom metrics and exports in Funnel.
Confirm that you can edit data sources and blends in Google Data Studio.
Prepare and export the follower data
Create a rule-based custom metric in Funnel that groups the native follower metrics into one field.
Add a rule for each data source. For example, use Lifetime Total Follows (Lifetime) for Facebook Pages and Followers for LinkedIn Organic and X Organic.
Create a Google Data Studio export that includes at least Date, Traffic Source and the custom follower metric.
Connect the export to your Google Data Studio report.
Calculate net new followers
Create the date offset field
Edit the Funnel data source in Google Data Studio.
Create a calculated field named
Date_offset_1_day.
Enter the following formula:
DATE(DATETIME_ADD(Date, INTERVAL 1 DAY))
Blend the follower data
Add a blended data source to the report.
Add Date, Traffic Source and the follower metric to the table on the left.
Add the same data source as the table on the right. Select Date_offset_1_day, Traffic Source and the follower metric.
Select a Left outer join.
Set Date and Traffic Source as the join conditions.
Save the blend.
In the blended data source, create a calculated field that subtracts the previous day's follower value from the current day's value.
What to expect
The blended data source contains the total follower value and the net change for each date and traffic source. You can use the same method to calculate the daily change for another cumulative metric if you use the correct dimensions as join conditions.