If you have been following our Build a Brand With Us series, you know this is not theory. We are building Monark Wild Rice’s online presence in real time and showing the exact steps we take to create results in social media.
This chapter focuses on one of the most overlooked yet most influential parts of building a brand: analytics tracking.
Follower count is one of the least reliable measures of ROI in social media. It is a vanity metric that looks impressive but often has little correlation to actual results.
True growth comes from building an engaged community. Engagement drives awareness. Engagement builds consideration. Engagement moves people toward a purchase.
At Monark Social Media, we track follower growth as part of the picture, but it is far from the metric that drives our decisions. The focus is on reach, impressions, and engagement. These numbers tell us how many people are seeing the brand, how often, and how they are interacting with it.
Delaying analytics tracking means missing critical insights from your brand’s earliest growth stages. Without those insights, strategy becomes guesswork.
Starting early allows us to:
Even small numbers matter at the start. They are the first signals of what is connecting with the audience and what is not. Those signals form the foundation for strategy.
From the first post, Monark Wild Rice’s analytics were tracked closely. TikTok quickly became our most effective testing platform because it delivers fast, detailed feedback.
Within weeks we saw a clear pattern.
How-to videos such as “how to cook wild rice” or “how to cook wild rice in a rice cooker” consistently drew high views and sparked active comment threads.
Those comments revealed something else. By monitoring comment sentiment, we noticed that opinionated or incorrect comments could be turned into an advantage. Replying with educational videos generated more reach and engagement.
This led to a repeatable, data-driven content cycle:
Without early analytics tracking, this cycle would not exist. We would not have identified outrage as an awareness driver or seen how-to content as the strongest awareness tool for Monark Wild Rice.
Every brand can begin with these three:
These numbers reveal how far your content is traveling, how often it is being seen, and how actively the audience is interacting with it.
Tracking does not have to be complicated. Reviewing these metrics weekly or monthly is enough to start spotting trends. Look for increases or decreases, then connect those changes back to the content posted in that period.
Every stage of the Build a Brand With Us process builds on the last. Analytics tracking gives us the evidence we need to shape content pillars, refine creative, and focus energy where it delivers results.
For Monark Wild Rice, this process has turned raw data into a roadmap that guides every decision and accelerates growth in a measurable way.
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