Figuring out how to get data about new followers from your social media channels can be a challenging task for some data sources. This is mainly due to API limitations or, more precisely, what data the API provides. In most cases, followers itself is a lifetime value, which means that the data source API returns the current value of the followers regardless of what time range you're looking at.
Supermetrics has created a template that you can use to get data on followers and new followers from the most common social media channels — Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube.
This guide instructs how to set up the template to use our Facebook Insights, Instagram Insights, Twitter Public Data, Twitter Premium, LinkedIn Company Pages, and YouTube data sources.
Before you begin
You need access to the following data sources:
- Facebook Insights
- Instagram Insights
- Twitter Public Data
- Twitter Premium
- LinkedIn Company Pages
- YouTube
About required licenses
To get all new users from Twitter, you need a license for Supermetrics for Google Sheets in addition to Supermetrics for Looker Studio license.
Instructions
Step 1: Set up data sources
To use our template, set up your data sources in Looker Studio first.
- In Looker Studio, click Create → Data source.
- Select the data source and follow the steps in the instructions below.
- Select the Facebook Insights data source by Supermetrics.
- Connect to the data source.
- In the setup view, don’t select reporting timezone or localization. If you have the reporting timezone or localization set up, data blending doesn’t work correctly. Start the setup process from the beginning without these selections.
- Otherwise, there are no restrictions; the only mandatory field is the page selection.
- Select the Instagram Insights data source by Supermetrics.
- Connect to the data source.
You can get followers and new followers data directly from the data source. However, note that the "New followers" metric only supports querying data for the last 30 days, excluding the current day. You can't use comparison either if the comparison time is longer than the last 30 days.
For Twitter data, set up the Twitter Public Data data source in Looker Studio and Twitter Premium data source on Google Sheets.
You can get the Twitter total followers data directly to Looker Studio using the Twitter Public Data, but to get the date associated with the Twitter followers from the Twitter Premium data source, you need to do some calculations in Google Sheets. New followers calculations can't be done on Looker Studio directly. To get the new followers data, collect the data on Google Sheets and then bring that data to Looker Studio for visualization.
Set up Twitter Public Data
- Select the Twitter Public Data data source in Looker Studio.
- Connect to the data source.
- Select the "Twitter user data" query type. With this, you get the followers data, which is a lifetime metric.
Set up Twitter Premium
Follow these instructions to set up the new follower calculations on Google Sheets and bring this data to Looker Studio.
Set up the query
- Go to Google Sheets and open the Supermetrics sidebar
- Select the Twitter Premium data source.
- Connect to the data source.
- Select the account you want to fetch data for.
- In Report configuration, select the Common account information query type.
- Select the Append new results to old option.
- Data coming from the Twitter API does not have the date field. Enabling the Append new results to old option creates a “fetch date” and makes it possible to calculate the new users moving forward. Historical date breakdown, however, is not possible to get.
- Select the Follower count metric and the Name dimension (account name).
- Run the query.
- You should now see columns: Fetch date (today’s date), Name, and Follower count.
- Give your Google Sheet and its tabs names that describe the content. You need to find the tab later.
Here is an example of query created on March 29, 2023.
Set daily refresh
To automatically refresh the query and add a new fetch date to the table, set up a scheduled refresh.
- Go to the Schedule tab.
- Set the action to Refresh daily.
- Click Save changes.
Create the new followers field
Once there is data accumulated, create a field called “New followers” using calculations between the current and previous date.
To do this with arrayformula (no need to copy paste the formula to another cell), create a helper column “Previous day followers”.
- Create a helper column and name it Previous day followers.
- Paste the arrayformula to the first cell of the column:
=ARRAYFORMULA(
IF(ROW(A:A)=1,"Previous day followers",
IF(NOT(ISBLANK(A:A)),
IFERROR(XLOOKUP((A:A-1),A:A,C:C),"N/A"),
"")))
In the example, the "Previous day followers" column is in column D: - Create a new column and name it New followers.
- Paste the arrayformula to the first cell of the column:
=ARRAYFORMULA(
IF(ROW(A:A)=1,"New followers",
IF(NOT(ISBLANK(A:A)),
IFERROR((C:C)-(D:D),"N/A"),
"")))
In the example, the “New followers” column is in column E:
Use data in Looker Studio
Use the Google Sheets connector to bring the data from this spreadsheet in Looker Studio.
- Select the Google Sheets data source by Google.
- Select the correct Google Sheets spreadsheet and the tab where your new table is created.
For the template, you need to set up two data sources from LinkedIn Company Pages data source by Supermetrics. Give the data sources unique names to identify them later.
Set up the Follower details query type
- Select the LinkedIn Company Pages data source by Supermetrics.
- Connect to the data source.
- Select the "Follower details" query type. This query type gives you the total number of followers.
- Name the data source LinkedIn Company pages - Follower details.
Set up the Historical follower statistics query type
- Create a new data source with LinkedIn Company Pages data source by Supermetrics.
- Select the "Historical follower statistics" query type. This query type gives you the number of new followers.
- Name the data source LinkedIn Company pages - Historical follower statistics
- Select the YouTube data source by Supermetrics.
- Connect to the data source.
The YouTube data source has fields “Channel subscribers count” and “Subscribers gained”.
Step 2: Copy the template and replace data sources with your own
- Open the Supermetrics social media template for Looker Studio.
- Make a copy of the report.
- Replace the report data sources with your own data sources that were created as per the instruction above.
- If the data sources are not visible, replace them in the following order:
- Facebook Insights
- Instagram Insights
- YouTube
- Twitter Public Data - Twitter user data
- Twitter Followers from Google Sheets
- LinkedIn Company pages - Follower details
- LinkedIn Company pages - Historical follower statistics