The Numbers Behind Your Feed: Social Media Analytics That Sponsors Check

Every racer's pitch deck has a follower count on it. Very few have the numbers a marketing director actually checks before signing off on a deal. Brands, and the valuation firms many of them hire, can pull up your engagement, your audience and the way you promote their logo whether or not you send it to them. So it pays to know what they are looking at and to watch the same numbers yourself.

Followers are the least interesting number

Rich Houseman of Hookit, a platform many motorsports brands use to score athletes and value sponsorships, told the Motocross Sponsorship Summit that the company has always looked at a kind of power-to-weight ratio: followers on one side, interactions on the other. "From day one we cared about how many followers you had, but we cared more about how many interactions you produce with those followers." ▶ Watch Rich Houseman on the motocross panel

Hookit co-founder and CEO Scott Tilton laid out what brands look at today. "They still look at followers, but more important than that is the engagement and the engagement rates. So how engaged are the followers that a partner has." Next came audience data: "Who's the target consumer, or who are we reaching as a result of this partnership, and is this our target consumer?" Brands can now benchmark those numbers against competitors, or against the companies they aspire to be, and see "is this good or not."

Tilton also draws a line many racers blur. Engagement means "a comment, a share, a retweet, and we separate that from video views. So we always talk about engagement and video views as two separate things." A clip with huge views and no comments tells a sponsor something different from a post that started a conversation. Report both, and label them honestly. ▶ Watch Scott Tilton explain this

Fake numbers get caught

Some racers still try to buy an audience. Houseman described how obvious it looks in the data. Hookit would see an athlete leap up its rankings in a short time, then watch what happened next. "All of a sudden after month one, it would start to tank. And all of a sudden this line would start to travel downwards to the point where it was very obvious they bought the followers, because they could not keep up with a matching amount of interactions." His verdict: "Those days of just telling brand managers that you have a bunch of followers, they're done."

Heath Cofran of Alpinestars said the brand does its own homework when a big account asks for support. "We do a little bit of digging and they'll have a post that has one comment or 10 likes, and you're like, something's not right here." He has turned down influencers with millions of followers after looking closely at what they post. ▶ Watch the motocross session

Brands also score how you promote them

The next layer is how a sponsor appears in your content. Fran Richards of Hookit explained the method to the Motorcycle Racing Sponsorship Summit. "We look at the actual engagement on a post, so it's the number of likes, comments, shares and video views, and then we look at what it costs in the ad market to buy an ad at the amount of engagement that you have. So that becomes what we call maximum ad value." Then Hookit discounts that number based on how clearly the brand shows up, visually and in the text.

The benchmarks are worth knowing. Richards said typical motorsports content scores about 10 to 15 percent on that quality scale, and a deliberate sponsor post might reach 30 percent. Push too far and it backfires: "If your posts are 90%, they kind of look like ads, and sometimes that actually reduces your engagement." There is a sweet spot between burying a sponsor and turning your feed into a commercial. ▶ Watch Fran Richards on valuing content

Tilton added two details that change how racers should post. Value varies by platform, because Hookit starts from what advertisers actually pay on each one, so "the same post with the same engagement might get different values depending on what the ad rates are on the platform at the time." And Instagram Stories can't be measured unless the athlete connects the account. "Instagram doesn't make those public, so you can't track them for value unless the athlete authenticates their account with us." If you post a lot of Stories for sponsors, link your accounts so that work gets counted. ▶ See the full interview

Read your own dashboard

Your platforms already give you most of what the brands see. Megan Meyer, who coaches racers on social media, pointed the Off-Road Sponsorship Summit to watch rate, the share of a video people actually watch. "If you can get 25% to 50%, that's really good watch rate. If you can get more than 50%, people are watching almost your full video, that is amazing."

She also uses the free Meta Business Suite to see when her followers are online, which differs by page. "On my Instagram, my key time to post is around 4 o'clock in the afternoon," she said. For her family's team page, "the best time to post on his page is 11:00 a.m. Central Time on Instagram. So you can tell we have different times, and that's because we have different audiences." ▶ Watch Megan Meyer on this

Meyer logs every post in a spreadsheet: likes, comments, follows, video views. "I like to see what performs well and what doesn't, so that way I know what I should keep posting about in the future," she told me in a Meet the Sponsors interview. "That's how I found out that when I post just pictures of the car, they tank, but when I post pictures of either just me or me with the car, they do really well." That same data belongs in your proof of performance report, the document a marketing director shows the CFO to justify renewing you. ▶ Watch the interview

Report what each sponsor measures

Not every partner cares about the same number. Kelsey, a longtime Formula Drift driver, said most of her partners value social media highly, "however, it does take a conversation to find out what each partner is looking for." Some care more about leads collected at events or activations than about likes. Ask before the season starts, then track that metric. ▶ Watch Kelsey on the drift panel

The general manager of Enjuku Racing, a drift-parts retailer, told the Drift Sponsorship Summit that this habit is what he wants to see from a team: "keeping tabs on the things that you're posting and how they're performing, so you can say, 'Hey, we generated these videos, we generated these photos, this is the response we got.'" If you're just starting out, he said, document whatever you can so a sponsor knows you think beyond race day. ▶ Watch the Enjuku session

The takeaway

• Lead with engagement rate and audience, not follower count, and report video views separately.
• Never buy followers or engagement. The trend line gives you away within months.
• Show sponsors clearly but not like an ad, and link your accounts to valuation tools so Stories count.
• Check watch rate and your page's best posting times every month, and keep a post-by-post spreadsheet.
• Ask each sponsor what it measures, then put those numbers in your proof of performance report.