How to set up the Looker Studio template for social media followers

  • Updated on Sep 5, 2025
  • Published on Jun 27, 2025
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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, X (Twitter), and YouTube.

Social media followers template for Looker Studio by Supermetrics, showing Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X (Twitter) and Youtube.This guide instructs how to set up the template to use our Facebook Insights, Instagram Insights, X Organic (Twitter), LinkedIn Company Pages, and YouTube data sources.

Before you begin

You need access to the following data sources:

  • Facebook Insights

  • Instagram Insights

  • X Organic (Twitter)

  • LinkedIn Company Pages

  • YouTube

About required subscriptions

To get all new users from X (Twitter), you need a subscription for Supermetrics for Google Sheets in addition to Supermetrics for Looker Studio subscription.

Instructions

Step 1: Set up data sources

To use our template, set up your data sources in Looker Studio first.

  1. In Looker Studio, click Create → Data source.

  2. Select the data source and follow the steps in the instructions below.

Set up Facebook Insights

  1. Select the Facebook Insights data source by Supermetrics.

  2. Connect to the data source.

  3. 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.

  4. Otherwise, there are no restrictions; the only mandatory field is the page selection.

Set up Instagram Insights

  1. Select the Instagram Insights data source by Supermetrics.

  2. 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.

Set up X Organic (Twitter)

For X (Twitter) data, set up the X Organic (Twitter) data source in Looker Studio and Google Sheets.

You can get the X (Twitter) total followers data directly to Looker Studio using the X Organic (Twitter) data, but to get the date associated with the X (Twitter) followers from the 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 X Organic (Twitter) for Looker Studio

  1. Select the X Organic (Twitter) data source in Looker Studio.

  2. Connect to the data source.

  3. Select the "Profile info" query type. With this, you get the followers data, which is a lifetime metric.

Set up X Organic (Twitter) in Google Sheets

Follow these instructions to set up the new follower calculations on Google Sheets and bring this data to Looker Studio.

Step 1: Set up the query

  1. Go to Google Sheets and open the Supermetrics sidebar

  2. Select the X Organic (Twitter) data source.

  3. Connect to the data source.

  4. Select the account you want to fetch data for.

  5. In Report configuration, select the Profile info query type.

  6. Select the Followers metric and Date dimension.

  7. Under Options, select the Format results to Looker Studio option.

  8. You can't get the historical data, but you can start cumulating it by using the APPEND_RESULTS setting. Enable this setting by typing APPEND_RESULTS to the Advanced settings field.

  9. Run the query.

  10. Give your Google Sheet and its tabs names that describe the content. You need to find the tab later.

Here is an example of a query created on March 29, 2023.

Step 2: Set daily refresh

To automatically refresh the query and add a new fetch date to the table, set up a scheduled refresh.

  1. Go to the Schedule tab.

  2. Set the action to Refresh daily.

  3. Click Save changes.

Step 3: 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 and paste the formula to another cell), create a helper column "Previous day followers".

  1. Create a helper column and name it Previous day followers.

  2. 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:

  3. Create a new column and name it New followers.

  4. 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:

Step 4: Use data in Looker Studio

Use the Google Sheets connector to bring the data from this spreadsheet to Looker Studio.

  1. Select the Google Sheets data source by Google.

  2. Select the correct Google Sheets spreadsheet and the tab where your new table is created.

Set up LinkedIn Company Pages

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

  1. Select the LinkedIn Company Pages data source by Supermetrics.

  2. Connect to the data source.

  3. Select the "Follower details" query type. This query type gives you the total number of followers.

  4. Name the data source LinkedIn Company pages - Follower details.

Set up the Historical follower statistics query type

  1. Create a new data source with LinkedIn Company Pages data source by Supermetrics.

  2. Select the "Historical follower statistics" query type. This query type gives you the number of new followers.

  3. Name the data source LinkedIn Company pages - Historical follower statistics

Set up YouTube

  1. Select the YouTube data source by Supermetrics.

  2. 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

  1. Open the Supermetrics social media template for Looker Studio.

  2. Make a copy of the report.

  3. Replace the report data sources with your own data sources that were created as per the instruction above. 

  4. If the data sources are not visible, replace them in the following order: 

    1. Facebook Insights

    2. Instagram Insights

    3. YouTube

    4. X Organic (Twitter)

    5. X (Twitter) Followers from Google Sheets

    6. LinkedIn Company pages - Follower details

    7. LinkedIn Company pages - Historical follower statistics