June 12, 2020 / Angelo Rosati

The Essential Guide on Social Media Metrics

Being successful on social media isn’t just about finding great things to post and getting thousands of followers. For true success, those posts and followers also have to translate into quantitative results for your business.

That’s where your social media metrics enter the picture as they help you get a clear idea of exactly how your efforts are paying off and how you can make improvements.

In this post, you’ll discover some of the most crucial social media metrics to measure and how they factor into your overall performance. Let’s get started.

Social media metrics: What are they and why should you track them?

Social media metrics are the key performance indicators (KPIs) that help you determine just how well your efforts are paying off. They can help you measure how well you manage to engage your audience, what types of posts resonate with them, and more.

So not only do they help you showcase the impact of your work through internal reports, they also feed your strategies and pave the way for major shifts in your approach. You can even use them to justify the need for new resources and budget increases for your social team.

15 social media metrics to track

As you can use these metrics to measure every aspect of your social media performance, you have an abundance of KPIs to choose from. So it can get a little overwhelming if you’re new to it. Let’s take a look at some of the most critical social media metrics you should measure:

Awareness metrics

These metrics give you some insight into your current audience as well as measure the potential for audience growth. They help you understand just how popular your brand is and how fast your popularity is growing.

1: Brand awareness
This metric measures the total number of brand mentions on social media during a specific time period. It helps you understand how your brand fits into trending conversations online and whether certain campaigns and posts have an impact on your popularity.

Brand monitoring tools like Mention will help you keep track of every social media conversation involving your brand even without an @mention.

2: Reach
This shows you the number of unique views your post could potentially get based on your follower count and the follower counts of people who shared the post. Native social media analytics tools typically provide reports for this metric.

3: Impressions
This helps you understand how often a post shows up in someone’s feed. You could use this metric to find out the correlation between changes in your approach and the visibility of your posts. This will then give you the necessary data to adjust your approach. For example, do you get more impressions when you post at a specific time of day?

4: Follower growth rate
This social media metric gives you an insight into your audience growth, specifically how it changes over time and how quickly. You can use these insights to find out whether certain changes in your approach correlate to a rapid rise or fall in audience growth. For example, did you see an impressive follower growth after your social media ad campaign?

5: Share of voice
Share of voice helps you measure the number of mentions your brand gets compared to the number of mentions your competitors get. You can use this to understand how your brand stacks up to the competition in terms of popularity.

Engagement metrics

6: Applause rate
This measures the number of positive reactions (likes, favourites, etc.) that you get for your posts relative to your following size. It helps you understand how your posts add value to your audience and inform your social content strategy.

7: Average engagement rate
Your average engagement rate helps you measure just how well your posts are resonating with your audience. It takes into consideration your total engagements (reactions, comments, and shares) relative to your following size. Try to figure out how engagement rate changes based on post type, post timing, and more and use the insights to inform your posting and content strategy.

Some social media platforms like LinkedIn will automatically measure this for you, though you’ll need more advanced analytics tools to measure engagement on platforms like Twitter.

8: Amplification rate
Amplification rate takes into account the total number of shares per post and measures it against your total follower count. It gives you an idea of just how willing people are to share your posts and whether certain types of posts are more share-worthy.

Conversion metrics

9: Click-through rate
This measures the rate at which your audience clicks on the call-to-action link in your social post. You can find out your click-through rate by dividing the total number of clicks with the total number of impressions. This is the perfect social media metric to understand how attractive your offer is and whether changes in your messaging make any difference.

10: Social media traffic
You should also measure the traffic coming from social media to see just how well the channel influences your overall performance. Better yet, use Rebrandly to tag each of your posts with unique UTM links and see how they drive traffic to your site.

This will help you figure out whether your audience responds better to certain types of posts and messages, which you can then use to inform your content strategy. The tool also gives you a complete breakdown of your social media traffic by platform, timing, devices, languages, and regions.

11: Social media conversion rate
To get a complete idea of how social media plays a role in your overall conversions, calculate your social media conversion rate. This helps you figure out what percentage of your total conversions can be attributed to your social media efforts.

12: Bounce rate
Not everyone who clicks on your link will stay, not to mention convert. Some of them will leave just seconds after they land and fail to take any action either because the offer isn’t relevant to them or the content doesn’t appeal to them. So make sure you measure your bounce rate from social media traffic to understand whether you’re targeting the right audience or using the right messaging.

13: Cost-per-click
When running a paid advertising campaign on social media, you need to measure your cost-per-click metric to understand how much each click on your sponsored post is costing you. A lower cost-per-click often translates to higher return on investment.

Additional metrics

14: Brand sentiment
Social media metrics like brand awareness and share of voice alone don’t paint the complete picture about your brand’s popularity. Even if you get thousands of mentions, it won’t do much for your brand if a huge portion of them are negative mentions. So you need to measure your brand sentiment as well as it helps you understand how people feel towards your brand.

Though you should monitor this metric constantly, it’s even more important to identify changes in sentiment after a major campaign or incident involving your brand. Platforms like Brand24 can provide you with comprehensive sentiment analysis.

15: Net promoter score
You can also set up an NPS survey on social media to find out how loyal your customers are to your brand. This metric helps predict future customer engagement by asking how likely people are to recommend your product or brand to a friend.

Wrapping up

These critical social media metrics help you understand the impact of your existing efforts while looking for opportunities to make improvements. It’s crucial that you keep a close eye on them so you can quickly detect alarming changes and fix them before it’s too late.

Note that although most of the metrics are available through native analytics on social media platforms, you’ll need more advanced analytics tools for some of them such as Sotrender. What other social media metrics are you measuring? Let us know in the comments.

Further reading:

This article is about:

B2C Social media marketing
Social media metrics
B2B social media marketing