The good and bad thing about social media is that you can track almost every single detail through social media metrics.
What are social media metrics? Social media metrics are performance indicators that measure the success of social media campaigns. Why are social media metrics important? Social media metrics are important because they help businesses track the success of their social media campaigns and make necessary adjustments. How do you find social media metrics? Social media metrics can be found using various social media analytics tools. Which social media metrics should you be paying attention to? The social media metrics you should be paying attention to depend on your business goals.
1. Engagement: Likes, comments, shares and clicks
Engagement is a big umbrella category to track.
The engagement rate measures how actively involved your audience is with your content, and how effective your brand campaigns are. Engaged consumers interact with brands through actions such as “liking” content, commenting, and social sharing.
If you have high engagement rates, it means your audience is responsive and interested in your content. It also means you have a good understanding of your brand.
At the granular level, you’ll look at different engagement metrics:
- Likes, Comments, Retweets, etc.: Individual engagement metrics like a Share or a Retweet add up. In a Twitter report, you’ll see a total number of engagements per post or profile.
- Post engagement rate: The number of engagements divided by impressions or reach. A high rate means the people who see the post find it interesting.
- Account mentions: Organic mentions, like @mentions that aren’t part of a reply, or tagging a brand in an Instagram story without prompting, indicate good brand awareness.
2. Awareness: Impressions & reach
Even though they are often confused, impressions and reach are both important metrics to track, especially if your goals for social media are focused on brand awareness and perception.
If you’re using metrics like reach and impressions to benchmark your brand’s performance, it’s important to understand the difference between the two.
At the post level:
- Impressions are how many times a post shows up in someone’s timeline. An especially high level of impressions compared to reach means people are looking at a post multiple times. Do some digging to see if you can understand why it’s so sticky.
- Reach is the potential unique viewers a post could have (usually your follower count plus accounts that shared the post’s follower counts). A valuable subset of this metric is to look at what percentage of your reach is made up of followers vs. non-followers. If a lot of non-followers are seeing your content, that means it’s being shared or doing well in the algorithms, or both.
Although impressions provide information about a piece of content’s potential visibility on social media, it is important to look at other metrics to get a complete picture of how well the content is performing. For example, if you want to increase awareness and educate your audience, you should look at both impressions and engagement.
3. Share of voice: Volume and sentiment
Functioning as a sort of barometer, share of voice can tell you quite a bit about your brand’s online presence in comparison to your competitors. A high share of voice usually indicates a strong presence, while a low share of voice might suggest that you need to put more effort into promoting your brand online. Share of voice is a metric used in public relations to show how much of the online sphere your brand is taking up. A high share of voice suggests a strong online presence, while a low share of voice might mean you need to do more to promote your brand online.
You can improve your brand’s share of voice over time by benchmarking and compare how it changes with different campaigns and other factors.
How much of the social conversation in your industry is all about you compared to your competitors? Social share of voice measures how many people are talking about your brand on social media.
Mentions can be either:
- Direct (tagged—e.g., “@Hootsuite”)
- Indirect (untagged—e.g., “hootsuite”)
The term SSoV stands for Share of Voice, which is essentially competitive analysis of how visible your brand is in the market. The idea is that the more visible your brand is, the more relevant it will be to potential customers. Therefore, measuring SSoV can give you a good idea of how well your brand is performing in the market.
To calculate your brand’s Social Sentiment of Voice (SSoV), add up every mention of your brand on social media across all networks. Do the same for your competitors. Add both sets of mentions together to get a total number of mentions for your industry. Divide your brand mentions by the industry total, then multiply by 100 to get your SSoV as a percentage.
Social sentiment
While SSoV keeps track of your involvement in social media, social sentiment monitors the emotions and attitudes associated with the conversation. If people are talking about you online, are they feeling positive or negative?
In order to calculate social sentiment, you need to use analytics tools that can process and categorize language and context. In the next section, we will provide some tips on tools that can help you with this.
4. ROI: Referrals & conversions
To find important social metrics, you’ll want to use a publishing strategy that uses UTM tracking and a website traffic analytics program. Google Analytics is a great program to use, or if you’re on an e-commerce platform like Shopify, there is a built-in traffic analytics program.
When a referral is clicked on from another website, the user lands on yours. Web analytics refers to this as a source, which can be broken down into different networks. Typically, you would monitor the “social” network to see how users are finding your website.
A conversion on a website is when a user takes an action that the website owner has deemed valuable, such as making a purchase. A social conversion occurs when a user who arrives at the website via a social media channel takes that valuable action.
Conversion rate benchmarks:
- Grocery: 6.8%
- Pharmaceuticals: 6.8%
- Health & beauty: 3.9%
- Travel & hospitality: 3.9%
- Home goods & furnishings: 2.8%
- Consumer electronics: 1.4%
- Luxury: 1.1%
- Automotive: 0.7%
- B2B: 0.6%
- Telecoms: 0.5%
- Media: 0.4%
- Financial services: 0.2%
- Energy: 0.1%
If you’re looking to see how your conversion rate stacks up to others in your industry, here are some benchmarks to keep in mind. Keep in mind that these benchmarks are specific to ecommerce sales, and that a purchase is not the only valuable kind of conversion.
Some common examples of areas where CTR is measured include:
- Email links and call-to-action buttons
- PPC advertisements
- Links on landing pages
- Social media advertising
- On-site elements (buttons, image, etc)
5. Customer care: Response rate & time
We’ve been pretty focused on the performance of posts and social media accounts, but we should also focus on our customers’ experience with our brand.
The response rate and response time are important metrics to track how quickly your team is responding to important messages. For multi-user accounts, you should also track how much each person is getting done.
6. Audience growth rate
The audience growth rate measures how fast your brand is gaining new followers on social media platforms.
To find your audience growth rate, divide the number of new followers you’ve gained on each platform by your total audience on that platform, then multiply by 100.
7. Amplification rate
Amplification Rate is the ratio of shares per post to the number of overall followers. In other words, the higher your amplification rate, the more your followers are expanding your reach for you.
To calculate the amplification rate, divide the total number of shares by the total number of followers and multiply by 100 to get the amplification rate as a percentage.
8. Virality rate
Virality rate is a measure of how often your content is shared, calculated as a percentage of impressions. This is different from amplification rate, which calculates shares as a percentage of followers.
To find a post’s virality rate, divide the number of shares by the number of impressions and multiply by one hundred.
9. Video views
Video views is not as important as the number of people who have seen the start of your video.
” If you make videos, you probably want to know how many people watch them. Each social media platform has a slightly different definition of what counts as a “view,” but in general, even if someone only watches a video for a few seconds, it still counts as a view.
10. Video completion rate
This is a good indicator of the quality of your content and how well it resonates with your audience.
The video completion rate is important to social media algorithms, so it is a good idea to concentrate on improving it!
11. Customer satisfaction (CSAT) score
Metrics that customer service is concerned with are not limited to response time and response rate. Another metric, CSAT (customer satisfaction score), measures how content people are with your product or service.
The CSAT score is usually based on a single, direct question: How would you rate your overall satisfaction? In this case, it is used to gauge the level of satisfaction with social customer service.
What was your overall experience with our customer service?
To calculate your CSAT score, add up all the individual scores and divide by the number of responses. Multiply this number by 100 to get the CSAT score as a percentage.
12. Net promoter score (NPS)
Net promoter score (NPS) is a metric that determines how likely customers are to remain loyal to a company.
Customers are asked to answer on a scale of zero to 10. Based on their response, each customer is grouped into one of three categories:
- Detractors: 0–6 score range
- Passives: 7–8 score range
- Promoters: 9–10 score range
NPS is special because it not only assesses customer satisfaction, but also how likely customers are to make future purchases. It has become a useful metric for all types of businesses.
13. Click-through rate (CTR)
The percentage of times people click on a link in your post to access additional content is called click-through rate (CTR). Content that can be accessed this way includes anything from a blog post to your online store.
The CTR (Click-Through-Rate) lets you know how many people saw your social media content and were intrigued enough to click on it. This is a good way to measure how effective your social media content is in promoting what you have to offer.
To calculate your click-through rate, divide the total number of clicks on your post by the total number of impressions. Multiply by 100 to get your CTR as a percentage.
Click-through rate benchmarks:
- Q1 2021: 1.1%
- Q2 2021: 1.1%
- Q3 2021: 1.2%
- Q4 2021: 1.2%
- Q1 2022: 1.1%
Although you should track the CTR for both organic and paid social content, this post is discussing the CTR specifically for paid social ads.
14. Cost-per-click (CPC)
The amount you pay per click on a social ad is called cost-per-click, or CPC.
If you know how much each customer is worth to your business, or even how much they spend on each order, you can put this number into perspective.
A higher lifetime value of a customer means you can afford to spend more per click to get visitors to your website in the first place.
Cost per click benchmarks:
- Q1 2021: $0.52
- Q2 2021: $0.60
- Q3 2021: $0.71
- Q4 2021: $0.70
- Q1 2022: $0.62
These benchmarks come from search advertising, but the numbers give a good impression of how CPC is trending.
15. Cost per thousand impressions (CPM)
CPM is determined by a few different factors, like your audience targeting and the ad network you use. CPM is a social media advertising metric that measures the cost per thousand impressions of an ad. CPM is determined by factors such as audience targeting and the ad network used.
CPM is all about views, not actions.
There’s no need to do any calculations, just import the data from your social media analytics.
CPM benchmarks:
- Q1 2021: $5.87
- Q2 2021: $7.21
- Q3 2021: $7.62
- Q4 2021: $8.86
- Q1 2022: $6.75
Conclusion
Dozens of social media metrics are available, but businesses should focus on the most essential ones that matter for most goals. Metrics are important because they show how successful a campaign or strategy is over time. You can find metrics in your native channel analytics section or through an all-in-one program.
Make sure to pay attention to engagement, impressions and reach, share of voice, referrals and conversions, and response rate and time. Having this 360º view of your social media performance is important. As time goes on and you have new goals, you will add more nuanced metrics that are relevant to your business.