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To understand how well you’re doing on platforms like Facebook and Instagram, you need to look at your social media metrics. Metrics are statistics that measure how many people see your content, engage with it, and take action as a result.
The problem for many brands is knowing which metrics are actually the most revealing and important commercially.
We’ve been in charge of the social media strategy for the brands we represent across dozens of different industries for the past 10 years.
In that time, we’ve learned that there are 31 key performance indicators (KPIs) you should use to measure and improve your return on investment.
In our experience, not all social media metrics are created equal — beware of vanity metrics that look great but make little to no difference to your bottom line.
Whether your brand is on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, or any other platform, these are the 31 social media benchmarks you need to watch the closest.
The 7 Most Important Social Media Metrics on Reach
Reach is one of the most important social media metrics.
You’ll find out from it just how many people your social media campaigns are reaching and whether you’re hitting the demographics you want.
1. Impressions
Impressions refers to the number of times a social media post you upload has been displayed on other people’s news feeds or timelines.
2. Post Reach
Reach is similar to the number of impressions a post gets but there’s an important difference.
Your post may be seen multiple times in the same person’s news feed because:
- The social networks’ algorithm has decided that your content is particularly relevant to that user.
- Someone else you follow has shared that content with you.
Post reach refers to the actual number of people who see your social media content.
3. Potential Post Reach
Potential post reach refers to the number of actual people who might see your content if your followers share it with their friends.
Think of potential post reach as free referral traffic. Almost like a follower acting as an unpaid promoter on your behalf.
Retweets are an example of sharing. Current data seems to suggest that people share around 12% of social media content in America.
4. Number of Followers
Your follower count is a particularly important social media metric.
The larger your number of followers, the bigger your potential audience.
5. Audience Growth Rate
Audience growth rate is the number of new followers who subscribe to you on social media channels minus the number of people who stop following you.
6. Share of Voice
Share of voice (sometimes called social share) describes how many times your company is mentioned in other people’s posts and tweets compared to your competitors.
Social share of voice is a useful indication of the level of online brand awareness your company benefits from.
7. Website Traffic
For many marketers, one of the most important social media analytics they look out for is the number of visitors coming to their website.
The best social media prompts followers to find out more about your company and its products.
Visitors may come either from posts or from your profile (your Facebook page, for example).
You can use Google Analytics to track who visits your website by inserting code into the URLs you use for your bio link, tweets, posts, and story links.
Getting Better Reach With Your Social Media Efforts
There are a number of actions you can take to improve your overall engagement metrics.
You should always optimize your social media profile. Choose the highest quality profile photo that best represents your brand. Make sure your bio is accurate, relevant, and contains the right SEO keywords. Signpost how to get to your website clearly by including a link in your description.
On the subject of relevance, Facebook on average only shows your organic (non-paid) posts to 6% of your followers. Make each social post as relevant as possible to your target demographics.
And perhaps the most important tip in any social media marketing strategy: Interact with the people who get in touch with you. Your social media account should not be an echo chamber where your followers’ replies go unanswered.
The 13 Engagement Social Media Metrics You Need to Track
Social media engagement metrics measure the level of interaction your content gets from your followers and others exposed to your content.
8. Number of Likes
On most social media platforms, there is a like button that users can press to indicate that they approve of a particular post.
The reason likes are important is that they let you know how relevant your content is to your target audience. Think of a like as a follower telling you that they want more of these types of posts.
9. Comments
Unless you switch them off, users can also comment on your posts.
Comments can be good or bad so you shouldn’t always take the number of comments you get at face value.
Followers’ comments do offer a great opportunity to understand how well your posts are being received.
Someone who has never used one of your products before may make a negative comment based on reviews they have read elsewhere. Their opinions may not be factually correct, so this is a chance for you to put the record straight for that person.
You can also look through your comments for indications on which content is hitting home and where it’s missing the mark.
For example, are a lot of people asking similar questions about a product you’re featured in a post? There might be an advantage to including the information they’re requesting in future posts about the same product.
Finally, comments give you a chance to respond and interact. Even if you just like someone’s comment instead of a full reply, this creates a connection with a follower.
Social media algorithms like it when you reply to comments as well, meaning future posts are more likely to appear in followers’ news feeds.
10. Mentions
Other social media users may mention you in one of their posts or in comments to someone else’s posts.
You can track these brand mentions to find out what your target demographic and the wider audience really think of your company.
Tracking brand mentions over time is a great way to measure how effective your online marketing efforts have been.
11. Link Clicks
As well as measuring traffic back to your website from your general social media campaign, you can track link clicks.
This social media metric measures how many people clicked through to your site from an individual post, for example.
12. Shares
When tracking social media metrics, many marketing managers consider the number of shares generated by a post as being of particular importance.
If something about a post has intrigued or interested a follower enough to want to share it with others, it was a success.
13. Customer Testimonials
Facebook allows users to leave customer testimonials on a brand’s profile page.
Testimonials give your brand social proof, showing others that your products and services deliver on their promises.
Always encourage your followers to share their experiences in the form of customer testimonials.
In addition, many people believe that you can determine how good a brand is when something goes wrong. Reacting quickly and decisively in a customer’s interest when an unfavorable testimonial appears can be just as beneficial as a glowing testimonial.
14. Profile Visits
The number of people visiting your profile provides a good indication of:
- How easy it is to find your brand on social media
- The number of users wanting to find out more about you after seeing one of your posts
A visit to your profile may be something a user does before visiting your website, signing up to a newsletter, or buying from you.
That’s why you should always keep it up to date.
15. Applause Rate
The applause rate is a mix of the above seven metrics to give you an idea of how successful your overall social media marketing campaign is.
You could come up with your own applause rate social media metric to measure how close you are to achieving what you want from your content.
For example, if you’re an e-commerce brand, you might want to weight your applause rate in favor of click-throughs to your website. The higher the click-throughs, the more opportunities to make a sale.
Alternatively, if you’re a food manufacturer whose products are sold in stores, you might weight your applause rate by the number of shares. The higher the number of shares, the more people know about your product and where to buy it.
16. Average Engagement Rate
Average engagement rate measures the number of favorites, saves, comments, and likes received by an individual post as a proportion of your total follower count.
A higher engagement rate means that you’re more likely to achieve what you want from your posts, whether that’s making a sale, getting people to your website, or generating a lead.
17. Net Promoter Score
Net promoter score is a way of measuring the loyalty your followers have towards your brand.
You can assess this by asking followers how likely they would be to recommend your brand and its products to others. The higher the proportion of users who would do so, the higher your net promoter score.
Net promoter score is closely related to the amplification rate ratio. Amplification rate is a way of measuring how much your followers associate with and like your company.
Again, the more people who share your content, the better your amplification rate.
18. Customer Satisfaction
As well as measuring the number of testimonials you have together with your amplification rate, you might want to run a poll on customers’ satisfaction levels for a complete picture.
19. Video Views
Behind image posts, video views generate the highest level of engagement on social media.
You can measure the visibility of your videos to followers and users by the number of times they’ve been watched.
You can also check which videos work better than others by measuring how long people view them for.
20. Instagram Story Views
Instagram Stories allow brands to upload 15-second videos to the platform that disappear after 24 hours. They have become an increasingly popular marketing tool in recent years along with Instagram Reels.
There are a number of related metrics you can use to determine the success of a particular Story including the:
- Number of messages you receive
- Responses to any poll you run
- Volume of swipe rights and swipe ups
Better Engagement With Your Social Media Marketing
The most successful social media management approach requires you to constantly measure how well your content resonates with your key demographics and adapt accordingly.
Many millennials and Gen Zers choose which brands they do business with based upon their perception of a brand’s social values.
Many companies get very high engagement rates when they share content about their corporate and social responsibility campaigns.
Hashtags allow your brand to get involved with ongoing debates and trends as well as helping users find you more easily.
Social media performance is also affected by the frequency with which you post. Post too much (especially promotional content) and this turns people away.
Vary each piece of content in tone, subject, and form (image posts, video posts, and so on).
Also consider running:
- Social media exclusives: Share information with your followers before posting it on your website.
- Quizzes: Story quizzes are a fun way to involve and interact with followers.
- Polls: Find out your followers’ views on issues. This could be silly or serious, and either way, you’ll learn valuable information!
- Competitions: As well as offering your latest products and services, this could be a great way to drive value from older or out-of-season stock.
- Q&A sessions: Your followers are interested in your products and services, so why not give them a chance to ask you what your plans are for the future?
- Behind the scenes at your company: Show followers around where you work and give them a virtual backstage pass to company events.
Bear in mind too that social media marketing has many similarities to content marketing.
With content marketing, there is a customer journey from initial recognition that they might need a product or service through to the point where they’re ready to buy.
Try to create content for each of these stages and measure engagement from followers using your social media analytics tool to see if there are points on the customer journey where you lose connection with a potential customer.
The 11 Conversion Rate Social Media Metrics You Should Pay Attention To
It’s important to keep track of your overall brand awareness online through reach and engagement.
However, the purpose of all advertising is to generate revenue.
Social media conversion metrics allow you to better understand how your Facebook ads and marketing efforts translate into sales and enquiries.
21. Click-Through Rate (CTR)
Before any sale takes place or any contact details are left, you have to get someone to visit your website first.
The first three statistics in this section are social media metrics monitoring just that.
Click-through rates show you how many times people visit your site as a percentage of:
- Your number of followers
- The number of people who see a post or ad
- The number of people who visit your social media profile
The higher your click-through rate, the more engaging your content.
22. Cost Per Click (CPC)
Two ways you can track cost per click are:
- The cost of promoting an ad divided by the number of times your website is visited
- Your overall social media budget divided by the number of times people visit your website from one of these platforms
The lower the cost per click, the better you are at persuading people to visit your website.
23. Cost Per Mille (CPM)
Some social media platforms charge you for every 1,000 people who see your ad or your organic content in their newsfeed.
It’s the opposite of cost per click because, with cost per click, you don’t pay anything until you get a visitor.
24. Bounce Rate
The first three social media metrics measured how much it cost to get people to your website.
Bounce rate measures the number of people who visit your site or landing page but who don’t do what you want them to do.
The higher your bounce rate, the higher your cost per sale or lead.
25. Conversion Rate
Conversion rates are another type of social media metric that tracks the number of people who do what you want them to do after seeing your content.
To achieve the best conversion rates, many marketers run split campaigns to test not only the content used in an ad but also the effectiveness of calls to action (CTA).
The CTA is the instruction in a post or ad for someone to do something like buy a product, download an e-book, leave their details for follow-up, and so on.
26. Revenue
You can measure revenue generated from either:
- A single post
- Your overall social media budget
By looking at the revenue generated from different types of content, you can determine which ones are more likely to be successful.
Likewise, you can track sales from your social media budget comparing one period of time to another to see if your campaign is heading in the right way.
27. Cost Per Sale
You can measure cost per sale by:
- An individual post
- Your social media digital marketing budget
You can then work out whether your cost of sale is low enough to make the effort or whether your campaign needs further tweaking so that you make the level of profit you want on each sale.
28. Non-Revenue Conversions
For brands who don’t sell online, non-revenue conversions normally measure the number of people or companies whose usable contact details they collect during a campaign.
You can encourage someone to leave contact details via:
- A sales inquiry
- An e-book or white paper download
- Getting them to join an email newsletter
- Persuading them to download a coupon for redemption at the point of sale
29. Cost Per Lead
As with cost per sale, you can track how much each lead costs, whether it comes from an individual post or as part of your overall social media budget.
You’ll also need to track the number of sales made from the leads generated to determine whether this is a profitable route to market.
30. Check-Ins
For businesses with a physical presence like restaurants, play centers, hotels, bars, and nightclubs, you can incentivize people to visit by offering them something of value.
Over time, measure which offers generate the highest number of visits and the greatest profitability.
31. Issues Resolved
Earlier in this article, we mentioned how many people judge a company on their reaction when things go wrong.
As a result, many brands measure the level of negative feedback and how each piece of negative feedback is handled.
Metrics you could choose for your brand include:
- The length of time it took someone from the company to respond
- The quality of their public response on social media
- How long it took to move the person complaining from a public platform to private correspondence
- How the customer views the company after being dealt with by the customer service team
Conversion Rates and Your Business Goals
You have to grab people’s attention and interest first on social media to drive up the number of clicks to your site.
Trying mixing CTAs, collection ads, video ads, product ads, and carousel ads for the same product to see which one people react to the best.
Fear of missing out (FOMO) can be channeled to online sales by playing on our fear of not having the opportunity to own something we might really want.
For example, when you’re on eBay and it tells you that 83 other people are watching the listing you’re interested in, that’s FOMO in marketing.
However, the basis of persuasion and building valuable relationships with customers ultimately lies in fulfilling promises.
If you persuade someone to visit your website, then what they find when they get there must back up the claims you make in your ads.
Get both right and you’ll get much higher click-throughs and better conversion rates from all social media platforms your brand has a presence on.
Making the Most From Your Social Media Metrics
Markerly’s custom-built platform has been built to meet the different content demands and user expectations of each social media network.
As well as managing your social media accounts, we can introduce you to influencers whose followers have an interest in your products and services.
Get in touch with us to find out more about our platform and how working with influencers connects you directly and personally to your target audiences.
First step: Fill out our contact form and let us know more about your brand and what you want to achieve with social media marketing!
