Social media metrics are data points that track the progress and success of your social media marketing strategy, helping you determine if it’s working or needs improvement. There are plenty of ways to track social media metrics, including social media scheduling tools and internal social media platform analytics software. Here are some of the most important social media metrics to track!
Social Media Awareness Metrics
Awareness metrics help track how many social media users are seeing your content and sticking around, making them potential customers. Many of these metrics can be determined for individual posts as well as your account as a whole to measure your social media performance over weeks and months. To grow your social media awareness and increase your audience, take the following social media metrics to heart and adjust your strategy accordingly.
Reach
Social media reach is the number of unique social media users that see your content—and repeat viewers won’t affect the data, which means business owners can identify how many individuals had the chance to learn about their brand. You can check social media reach for each post and your overall account. Track this social media metric by checking on your account insights provided by social media platforms.
Post reach tells you how effective a specific post was at reaching new users, giving you insight on what elements to focus on going forward. Account reach is a measure of how effective your social media strategy is overall. If your account starts reaching fewer people, it might be time to revisit your marketing tactics.
Impressions
Social media impressions tell business owners how many times their content appeared in front of users—including repeat views. Similar to reach, impressions are usually tracked using social media analytics tools provided in the platform, and they can be measured for both individual posts and your account as a whole.
Impressions are an indication of both opportunity and effectiveness for your social media efforts. Each time someone sees your posts or account, it’s another opportunity for them to interact with your content again, which further boosts your visibility. If you have a lot of repeat post and account viewers, it also shows your followers enjoy that content!
Video Views & Video Completion Rate
Engaging social media videos are a valuable asset in any brand’s social media strategy. To track how engaging your social media videos are, you’ll need to look at social media video views and video completion rates. Social media video views have different standards depending on the platform, but most only require that people view a video for a few seconds to be considered a view.
What Counts as a View on Social Media Platforms?
- Facebook: 3 seconds
- Instagram: 3 seconds
- LinkedIn: 3 seconds
- TikTok: As soon as a viewer starts the video
- X (formerly Twitter): 3 seconds
- YouTube: 30 seconds for long-form videos, as soon as the viewer starts the video for Shorts
Your social media video views are important to show the number of people who are seeing your video, as well as how well your initial video hook is performing on social media platforms like YouTube. However, views on YouTube and other platforms can only tell you so much.
Video completion rate on social media tells you a bit more about your audience’s sentiment toward your content. It’s calculated with the following formula:
Video view-throughs are simply the number of times your video was played to the end, and this info is available through the analytics tools in social media platforms. An average video completion rate of 70% – 80% is considered good, as this means most of your viewers are watching content all the way through.
Social Media Share of Voice (SoV)
The amount of conversation in your industry that your business or brand occupies, your Share of Voice metric can be calculated by finding mentions of your brand across social media platforms—which can be done with the help of social media monitoring tools like Sprout Social, Hootsuite, and Keyhole.
Brand mentions can be tagged or untagged—all that matters is the name of your business being mentioned. Once you know your stats, you’ll need to conduct a competitive analysis of your competitors’ brand mentions (tagged and untagged) to compare the two in the following formula:
Audience Growth Rate
Your audience growth rate is essentially your social media subscriber or follower count over time. This social media metric is usually accessible through platform analytics or your social media analytics tools.
In general, it is important to track your audience growth rate post by post to see which posts might be converting impressions to followers, but audience growth rate is also a great indicator of how your social media strategy is doing over time as a whole. If you find your audience is trending down over time, you’ll want to reassess your social media strategy or targeted audience.
Social Media Engagement Metrics
When you’re assessing the effectiveness of your social media campaigns, one of the most important things to look at is whether or not people are interacting with your social media content—both when you initially post and over time. These interactions can be tracked with the following social media engagement metrics.
Engagement Rate
Engagement rate tracks how often social media users interact with your content. Since different platforms have different engagement metrics, here’s a quick overview of what goes into the social media engagement for specific platforms:
- Facebook: Reactions, comments, shares, saves, clicks, views
- Instagram: Likes, comments, shares, saves, clicks, poll votes
- LinkedIn: Reactions, comments, shares, reposts, clicks, follows
- TikTok: Likes, comments, shares, saves, clicks, poll votes
- X (formerly Twitter): Likes, replies, retweets, views, clicks, follows, poll votes
You can usually track these different forms of engagement through the analytics tools provided within each social media platform.
To calculate your social media engagement rate for an individual post, you’ll first need to add together the various forms of engagement you’ve received for that post. Then, use one of the following formulas to determine your engagement rate by the reach of the post, total followers, or by social media impressions:
Once you’ve been posting for a while, you’ll be able to track your average social media engagement over time for the same three groups. You can track social media engagement weekly or monthly—either is a good amount of time to assess how effective your social media strategy has been and whether you need to increase social media engagement efforts. To calculate average total engagement over a specific period of time, simply add up the engagement rates from each post for that timeframe, and divide the resulting total by the number of posts.
Applause Rate
A version of engagement rate, applause rate more specifically tracks positive social media interactions—such as likes, positive reactions like loves and laughs, and favorites—relative to the number of followers. Calculate applause rate using the following formula:
This social media metric is important because it shows you how much your followers approve of your posts. For posts with a high engagement rate but low applause rate, you’ll need to assess the effectiveness of your content and see how you can improve.
Share Rates
Shares are a particularly important aspect of social media engagement, since they’re a big way your business will reach more social media users, thus increasing your social media impressions. There are two main social media metrics to track that are specific to sharing:
Amplification Rate: The amount your content has been shared by your followers:
Virality Rate: The amount your content has been shared by any social media users who have seen it:
Social Listening & Customer Service Metrics
Social media listening and social media customer service metrics are incredibly important for customer retention. These social media metrics are better measured over time in weekly and monthly check-ins, as it’s more difficult measuring per post since these metrics are meant to give you a more broad understanding of your brand perception.
Average Response Time
Social media capabilities like direct messaging and commenting are major communication methods customers use with brands for giving feedback, asking questions, and handling issues easily, quickly, and more directly.
Maintaining prompt, consistent social media response times is incredibly important for developing a good customer service strategy and keeping your brand reputation positive. Most customers prefer brands to respond to social media comments and messages within 24 hours, and plenty of your competitors most likely abide by this time frame.
To find your average response time, gather and add up all your response times for a specific time period (over a week or month is usually best), then divide by the number of response times you included.
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
Normally, calculating the Customer Satisfaction Score—the percentage of how satisfied customers are with your business—comes with obtaining survey responses. But on social media, you could also measure CSAT through a poll in a post, story, or through your comment section reviews. Use the following formula to get your CSAT:
Keep in mind you want this number to be as high as possible, as even a 75% customer satisfaction score indicates only 3/4 of your customers are happy.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Net Promoter Score indicates how likely a customer is to recommend your business. It can be measured by surveying your social media audience with a 1-10 scale of how likely they are to recommend your business to others. Once you collect the survey, sort the answers into the following groups:
- Promoters: Responded 9 or 10, satisfied, would share your business with others
- Passives: Responded 7 or 8, neutral, would possibly switch to a competitor
- Detractors: Responded 0 to 6, dissatisfied, may dissuade potential customers
Once you have your responses sorted into these groups, calculate your Net Promoter Score with the following formula:
What’s considered a good Net Promoter Score varies by industry, so stay up to date with your industry data to ensure you have a desirable score.
Audience Sentiment
Also known as brand sentiment, audience sentiment evaluates comments and brand mentions deeper to see how your social media audience actually feels about your brand. By looking at the language people use when they mention your brand, you can get an idea of public opinion of your business. There’s not necessarily an in-depth formula for audience sentiment, but you can use social media sentiment analysis tools to track this social media metric.
Social Media Marketing Metrics
When you’ve developed your organic social media strategy enough to add in a paid social media strategy, you’ll need to start tracking paid social media metrics, as well. You can measure these metrics per each post, or you can measure them over time—usually weekly, monthly, or over the period of your paid social media campaign. These social media metrics will help you assess your social media campaign’s effectiveness so you can make informed decisions about how to best use your social media marketing budget.
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
Click-through rate is the number of social media users who click on or otherwise interact with a social media ad or post—and a great indicator of the effectiveness of your call-to-action and link copy. This social media metric is measurable through provided analytics you can access when you take out a paid social media ad, or you can use social media tools to track it. The average click-through rate on social media is only about 1.1% – 1.3%, which may seem low but is roughly the same as other paid marketing strategies like paid search campaigns.
Conversion Rate
Conversion rate is a general tracker for the effectiveness of a social media ad. Your “conversion” is your goal for the post. Do you want your social media audience to visit your website, follow your account, make a purchase, or simply look at more of your posts? Based on this goal, you can track how many social media users you convert using social media analytics tools or the analytics software that comes with your paid social media ads. Similar to engagement rate, conversion rate can be calculated for post reach, followers, and impressions with the following formulas:
If you’d like to calculate your social media conversion rate over time, simply add up the total conversions you’ve collected over a week or month, divide by the number of values you added up, and plug that number in for “conversions.” You’ll also need to find the average reach, number of followers, and post impressions over the same amount of time.
Bounce Rate
Social media bounce rate is when social media users click through to your business website or product page, but leave without engaging with any of your content. Bounce rate can indicate the effectiveness of your social media post, as well as the effectiveness of your website landing page or the relevance of your social media post to your landing page.
Compared to other marketing channels, social media does generally have a higher bounce rate, so a social media bounce rate around 50% is considered good. You can track social media bounce rate with your marketing analytics tools or website analytics tools.
Cost Per Click (CPC) & Cost Per Mille (CPM)
Both cost per click and cost per mille (also known as cost per thousand impressions), are incredibly important to your paid marketing budget for social media. These social media metrics can help you create a budget and monitor your spending.
CPC refers to the cost you’ll pay every time social media users click on your ad, while CPM is the price for every thousand impressions (or every thousand times your social media ad appears in front of users).
Social media platforms will have a different average CPC and average CPM that fluctuates depending on your industry and competition. Usually, CPC will range from a few cents to a few dollars, while CPM will range from around $1 to $15. When you take out a social media paid ad, you’ll have to choose between billing by CPC or CPM. As these social media metrics can fluctuate greatly over time, it’s important to stay up to date so you know what you’ll be paying and where your social media budget is best spent.
Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)
Social media return on ad spend is similar to return on investment (ROI) in that it’s a social media metric that’s measured at the end of a paid social media campaign to assess its level of success financially. To calculate ROAS, you’ll plug the numbers of your social media ad campaign revenue and cost of the campaign into the following formula:
You’ll normally use this measurement as an indication of effectiveness and a signal for whether you need to change your paid social media strategy in the future.
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