If you want to be successful with your social media strategy, tracking your metrics is essential. Doing so can help you answer a lot of questions, such as:

• Are you using social media correctly?
• Are you seeing a return on investment in your social media strategy?
• Is it easy to measure your social media efforts?

Whether you use Facebook, Instagram, X, or TikTok, tracking social media metrics can help determine whether your social media strategy works. The good news is that measuring your social media metrics is not hard. It's easier than you can imagine. 

What Are Social Media Metrics?

Social media metrics refer to the data points necessary to track the performance of your social media account and content and its impact on your business goals. When you understand your key social media metrics, you can understand the type of content that resonates with your audience. The data can provide great insights into opportunities that can better resonate with them.

Why Tracking Social Media Metrics is Important

Social media metrics and KPIs matter because they indicate your objectives and inform you of the actions to take with your social media marketing. They help you understand your major performance benchmarks and competitive standing.

According to a 2023 study, half of business leaders suggested that social media data and insights guided their business strategy. Understanding the value of social media and ROI is one of the challenges that many social media marketing teams face.

Remember that social media platforms constantly change their algorithms and add new features. You can easily plan your content strategy by monitoring social media metrics and determining your next move. Therefore, metrics assess the effectiveness of your social media strategy. Metrics will show if something isn't working in your social media strategy.

Social Media Metrics That Matters

No matter the social media platform you are using, there are specific metrics you need to track. These are:

Awareness Metrics

The awareness metrics measure your current and potential audience through reach and impressions. These metrics include various others, such as:

• Impressions. This refers to the number of times someone comes across your profile on their timeline.
• Reach. This refers to the unique people who view your posts. You can read our guide on increasing reach and engagement on Facebook.
• Brand mentions. This metric tracks the mentions your brand gets online over a specific time frame. Also known as the share of voice, this metric will show you how your brand is perceived online.

With regular social media updates determining the content shown to the user's feed, there is a chance that most of your audiences will not get to see your content. That’s why many social media users are reporting a decline in their organic post’s reach.

Engagement Metrics

These metrics help measure how your audience reacts to your content. To understand the engagement rate, divide your followers' total number of post engagements by 100. A high engagement rate indicates that your content resonates well with your audience. Remember that each platform has its crucial engagement metrics. These metrics can be sub-categorised into:

Engagement Rates

For instance, if you run an X marketing campaign, you should measure retweets. On the other hand, when doing Facebook or Instagram marketing, you should consider reshares. The engagement level on TikTok or any other social media platform can be an umbrella for several metrics, such as likes, comments, shares, click-through rates, and retweets.

Likes and Reactions

These metrics refer to the number of people who have physically liked or reacted to your posts. While many creators don't see the value in this metric, it's still one of the most important ones, especially on platforms like Facebook, as they help you determine how people receive your posts. When tracking engagement rates such as likes and comments, you should compare them over a particular period to decide whether they are increasing or decreasing.

Comments 

Comments matter as engagement rates because they show your audience has something to say. Replying to these comments can drive engagement further, helping you appear more on their timeline. You can also use the comment section to get ideas for your next posts. Finally, it will show you how effective your posts are in the eyes of your clients.

Like the likes, it's essential to measure how your comments grow over a certain period, such as weekly or monthly. This can be a good indicator of whether your content strategy is working.

Shares

Shares are another metric that helps determine if your audience reacts to your content. The fact that they are ready to share your page with their family and friends is a vote of confidence in your content. There are several other reasons why your followers can share your posts. These include:

• They agree with the post.
• The post was informative.
• The post was inspirational.

No matter why they share your content, it acts as an emotional response and a sign of how well your content performs. If there is a drop in the number of shares, you can go back and see the type of content receiving the highest number of shares and focus more on such content.

Reach Metrics

Also referred to as brand awareness, the reach is a good indicator of the number of people your content reaches and the level of attention your brand gets on social media. These metrics can help you determine your account’s overall reach. These can be categorized into:

Reach

This is simply the number of people who viewed your content. When measuring reach, you need to monitor the overall reach of your social media account and the reach of each video, post, or story. You also want to know how much your reach consists of followers and non-followers. If most of your reach comes from followers, your content is performing well and getting shared.

Impression

The impression is a metric measuring the number of times your content is put before an audience. It could be the impression of each post and the overall impressions of your account. Sometimes, your account can have a higher impression than reach because the same person views your content twice.

If you are getting a considerably higher impression level than reach, it's an indication that some users are viewing your posts more than once, and therefore, you should do more research to find out the reason for this.

Brand Mentions

Also referred to as the social share of voice, these statistics indicate the number of people discussing your brand on social media compared to the competitor. There are different types of brand mentions, such as:

• Direct mentions such as tagged.
• Indirect mentions such as untagged.

Brand mention can be a good indicator of your brand's visibility in the market.

Conversion Metrics

Any social media campaign's goal is to convert through a purchase or clicking a link to a website or a social media post. Even though conversion is often associated with advertising, these measurements indicate a campaign's effectiveness. Here are the critical submatrices of conversions.

Conversion Rate

After running a social media post or campaign, how often does it result in an action such as a sale, download, or subscription? This critical social media metric shows how valuable your campaign is, whether paid or organic.

Cost Per Click (CPC)

The cost per click is the amount you pay for each click on an ad on social media. To help you understand this metric fully, you can also determine the average order value and the customer’s lifetime value. If your business has a higher lifetime value and a high conversion rate, you can afford to spend more on each click to bring visitors to your site.

Click-through Rate (CTR)

CTR is a measure of the number of times people show interest in your posts by clicking on a link to one of your posts to find additional content. The link could be to a blog post or an online store. You can calculate the CTR by dividing the total clicks of a post by the number of impressions and multiplying the results by 100.

By looking at the CTR, you can get an idea of the number of people interested in learning more about viewing your social media content. A high CTR rate is an indicator that the content you are creating is effective in promoting your brand.

CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions)

As the name suggests, CPM refers to the amount you pay for every thousand social media impressions on an ad. CPM is usually more about views than actions.

Audience Metrics

To understand who your audience is and its size, you should look at the audience metrics. Then, you can use the data to improve your messaging and grow your account. The Audience metrics can be categorized into:

Follower Count

You must monitor your follower growth to understand if your social media presence is growing well. This is an important metric, as statistics indicate that 70% of the people who follow a brand on social media plan to buy from it in the future. A high follower count suggests that your social media efforts are bearing fruit.

Follower Growth

With follower growth, you can measure the number of people your brand gets on social media within a particular time frame. Instead of considering a simple number, you can calculate the number of new followers as a percentage of the total audience. When getting started, even ten new followers will result in a higher growth rate. But with a larger audience, you need more new followers to have a high follower growth rate.

When measuring the audience or follower growth rate, you must measure the new followers on every social media platform over a particular period. You can then multiply the number by your total audience on every platform by 100. This will provide you with the percentage of the audience growth rate.

Audience Demographic

When running a social media campaign, you must understand who makes up your audience by determining their age, gender, and location. You also need to decide when they are mostly online. The audience demographic is all about this and is an essential social media metric to track. It can help you create an excellent social media strategy, determine the best posting time, and create the right marketing messages.

Social Media Sentiments

It's essential to understand the attitudes and feelings causing the conversations. When people discuss your brand online, are the talks positive or negative? Sentiment analysis considers opinions and feelings instead of simply counting comments or mentions when calculating social sentiments.

Video Performance Metrics

When running YouTube or TikTok marketing, one of the most critical metrics you need to track is the video performance metrics. Some of the KPIs to track under these metrics are:

Watch Time

Measured in minutes, watch time is the total duration viewers spend watching your social media videos. This could be the time spent watching the whole video, replays, or rewatches. A high watch time on YouTube indicates the user's interest and satisfaction. Therefore, this metric is essential to track when selling on YouTube to ensure growth.

View Count

Different social media platforms count views differently. However, most of them count a view when a viewer watches a video for a few seconds. Here are several ways in which platforms track views:

• YouTube: A minimum of 30 seconds.
• Instagram and Facebook: A minimum of three seconds
• TikTok. When a video starts playing.

Understanding the video view count can give you an idea of the number of people who have watched a video.

Video Completion Rate

While video views are great metrics to track, they aren't an excellent choice to show you how engaging your videos are. As noted earlier, a platform like TikTok will count a view when a user opens a video. A better metric to show you how interested people are in your video is the video completion rate.

This shows how often people watch your video to the end. If your videos have a higher competition rate, this is an indicator that you are creating quality content that resonates well with your audience. A high video completion rate will also send a positive signal to the social media algorithm and is an excellent place to focus.

Conclusion

You need to track various metrics for a successful social media campaign. This can help you to improve your campaign. However, if you aren't sure of the right metrics to track, it can result in information overload. That’s why it is essential to understand the top metrics to track. By considering the above metrics, you should be able to take your campaign to the next level.