Social media metrics are essential to social strategy. They give you insider insight into how your channel is performing and how your target audience is viewing you. They can also provide you with ways to improve your strategy.
But what metrics should marketers be tracking to ensure success or boost their strategy? To keep you from getting bogged down in all the numbers, we’ve put together a list of the essentials. social media metrics to track.
These metrics will give you insight into customers, how to track ROI, improve your brand presence online and walk away with happy customers.
What are social media metrics?
Social media metrics data shows how well your social media strategy is working in terms of reaching your marketing goals. These metrics can help you understand everything from how your audience interacts with your social media pages, how you can improve your strategy, and how much your brand earns from social media.
Marketers can track and measure social media metrics to determine their brand strategy for growth and improvement.
How to measure social media marketing performance
Marketers can measure the performance of their social media marketing strategy in a number of ways. The most common methods are analyzing web traffic, impressions, engagement and lead generation.
Let’s explore these different aspects of performance and more metrics marketers should track to ensure the success of their social media marketing efforts.
social media metrics
- web traffic
- Raid
- lead generation
- like comment
- Total Sales/Revenue
1. Web Traffic
Depending on the nature of your business and the social media platforms your company focuses on, increasing traffic to your website should be a top priority. 27% of marketers surveyed by HubSpot Blog listed traffic to their website as a high priority metric for measuring the success of organic social media campaigns.
30% said the same for paid social media campaigns. If your company relies on web traffic as part of its business strategy, you may want to measure how many of your page views come directly from social media.
Major platforms for this focus include Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. You can use web traffic tools like Google Analytics to measure how much of your traffic comes from organic social media.
2. Social Media Impressions
Social media impressions measure how many users were exposed to your content, and it’s a metric worth tracking.
Understanding your social media impressions is important because this data can provide valuable insight into how far your ad spend can go and can help inform future paid ad spend so you can maximize your budget.
However, even if paid advertising isn’t part of your strategy, you’ll still want to see how many impressions your social media content is garnering over time. This data can tell you how different types of content resonate with your audience across platforms.
It’s also worth noting that each social media platform measures impressions differently. For example, on Twitter, each user who views a Tweet is considered an impression.
On Facebook, whenever a paid ad is viewed on screen, it is considered an impression. Instagram counts an impression every time a user views a piece of content (such as a static post, story or reel).
On TikTok, there is no “impression” measurement in the Analytics section of the app; However, you can consider each video view as an impression for its own data.
3. Lead Generation
Lead generation means attracting prospects to your business and increasing their interest through nurturing with the ultimate goal of converting them into customers. Marketers can generate leads through social media by creating compelling content that engages and delights audiences.
To measure the success of your social media at generating leads, measure other metrics such as web traffic, lead quality and conversion rates from your social media channels.
For example, a large amount of website traffic from Twitter may indicate that your Twitter is a good source for lead generation.
4. Likes / Comments
Having a large number of followers isn’t helpful if the audience isn’t regularly interacting with your content. Therefore, it is essential to measure how often viewers like and comment on your social media posts. Nearly a quarter of marketers we surveyed listed likes/comments as an important social media metric to track.
Likes tell your audience how much they viewed and enjoyed your content, while comments provide insight into your audience’s response. Do they like your social media content? Do they have questions? What resonated with them about your content?
Likes and comments are part of your brand’s overall social media engagement.
To measure a social media account’s overall engagement rate, you can use the following formula:
5. Gross sales/revenue
Is your social media campaign resulting in direct revenue and sales? What has been your ROI? Overall sales and revenue metrics are important to measure the success of your campaign.
Many social media platforms that offer monetization are transparent about how much marketers and creators can earn from their platforms, making it easy to track how your activity relates to sales and revenue.
Now that you know what metrics marketers are tracking according to our survey — here are some tools you can use to make tracking easier.
Tools to track social media metrics
- Google Analytics
- hubspot
- netbase quid
- quintly
1. Google Analytics
Price: Free
Why it’s great: Tracks web traffic analytics and provides business insights
The latest version of Google Analytics collects website and app data to better understand the customer journey. The tool also includes privacy controls such as cookieless measurement as well as behavioral and conversion modeling.
2. hubspot
worth: $800 – $3,600/month for Marketing Hub Get started for free
Why it’s great: Monitors social media brand mentions and web traffic
HubSpot’s analytics software and dashboard track the entire customer lifecycle. We also help marketers make it easy to monitor brand mentions, automatically track engagement, and schedule social posts.
3. netbase quid
worth: $300-$1,000/month
Why it’s great: Global insights and tracking
NetBase Quid provides analytics on the interactions happening with your brand around the world. They provide real-time analytics and give you insights that will help you track ROI. NetBase Quid provides data about how your campaigns hold value with customers.
Users can also identify emerging trends to decide and scope out the main drivers of conversation on social media.
4. quintly
worth: $345/mo
Why it’s great: see competitor performance
When using Quintley, you can not only track your social media performance but also gain insight into your competitors’ performance. This will help you see what you can do to improve your campaigns and what your competitors are doing. This picture is just an example of the insights the software provides.
Quintly is also great for agencies with multiple clients. They can use it to manage their customers’ accounts and track their social media pages. Quintley also has reporting and benchmark data to measure campaigns.
There are a lot of numbers to keep track of when monitoring the success of your campaign, but getting caught up in the wrong numbers can be a waste of time. Now that you know the metrics marketers are tracking, you can cut down on the clutter and focus on the numbers that matter.
