Introduction
Social Insights provides one standard reporting board that covers the analysis needs of a social publishing team. You can also save a copy of the board and adapt it to your needs, or create your own analyses. For that, we recommend that you check the Social Insights Data Model.
Before reading this article, it helps to understand how the underlying data behaves. See for the four key principles (cumulative metrics, the 30-day post lifetime, hourly refresh, and the analysis period filter). Unless stated otherwise, every metric on the board is a lifetime total for posts published during the selected analysis period.
Where to find the board
The standard Social Insights board is available in your Piano Analytics library, alongside your other Piano Analytics resources. Go to Boards > Piano Analytics > All Resources in your library.
For general guidance on viewing and using boards, see About Workspaces.
How the board is organized
The board gives a complete overview of your social media activity across all platforms. It is divided into four tabs:
-
Overview: a cross-network summary of reach and engagement.
-
Publishing: your publishing activity, format mix, and post-level performance.
-
Facebook: Facebook performance in detail.
-
X (Twitter): X performance in detail.
Each tab is described below. For the definition of any individual metric, see the Social Insights data model.
Overview tab
The Overview tab is your cross-network starting point. Before you dive into any single platform, it answers one question: across everything you published in the period, how much reach and engagement did you generate, and where did it come from? It opens with the headline totals, then shows how both your publishing activity and your results split across networks and handles. The network comparison table lines up your platforms on the same metrics, so you can see at a glance which one is pulling its weight. The top handles and top posts views then surface your strongest performers by reach, each paired with an engagement view so you can tell real engagement apart from raw visibility. Use this tab to decide where to focus before drilling into a specific network.
Publishing tab
The Publishing tab shifts the focus from results to activity: what you posted, in which formats, and how each post performed. It shows your publishing cadence over time, so you can spot bursts or quiet stretches, and breaks your posts down by media type (link, video, photo, status) to reveal how your format mix evolves. You can compare those formats against the metric that matters to you, for example, which one earns the most views. The tab closes with a post-by-post table, where you inspect individual posts on views, shares, likes, comments, and engagement rate. This is where you connect a specific piece of content to its performance.
Facebook and X tabs
The Facebook and X tabs each take one network and go deep, so you can evaluate that channel on its own terms rather than blended into the cross-network totals. Both tabs follow the same structure: they open with the network's headline metrics, then break its interactions and engagement down by type, track how those build up over time across each post's first 30 days, and finish with post-level video performance.
The two tabs differ in a few network-specific ways. On Facebook, interactions include the full reaction breakdown (love, wow, haha, sorry, anger), and video performance is measured with time-based milestones (3-second and 30-second plays). On X, interactions include saves instead, and video performance is measured with percentage milestones (25%, 50%, and 75% of the video watched). Everything else reads the same way on both, so once you are comfortable with one tab, you can read the other at a glance.
