8 social media metrics you should be tracking in 2023
Emily Ward Social media metrics are what businesses use to monitor and measure how well their social media strategy is doing and gauge the overall impact their social content is having.
It’s therefore invaluable to any business to have these metrics set up and followed.
Social media metric tracking will not only help an organisation understand how many people are seeing their content and how much profit they’re making but, it also forms an extremely important part of their long-term growth and development as a business.
Here are our 9 top social media metrics that we think your business should be tracking to always stay on top of your social media strategy and ahead of your competitors.
The most important social media metrics to track
- Impressions
Where brand awareness is concerned, a good impression is what you want to make to a new customer.
Impressions show the number of times a post shows up in a social media user’s timeline. Impression metrics can sometimes be higher than reach metrics – this is because the same person might have looked at your content more than once. It’s about how much your content has “impressed” upon them. While impressions tell you a lot about your content, it’s still vital that other social media metrics are looked at too.
- Reach
Reach is the number of unique people who see your content. It can show how viral your content has gone and also gives you an indication of how well it’s performing. A good tip is to look at what % of your reach is made up of followers vs non-followers.
If you find that a lot of non-followers are viewing your content, this means that it’s being shared and the algorithms are recognising it. This social media metric is also a good indication of conversions, if you’re reaching enough people for example, but you’re not converting these people into customers, ask yourself why?
By measuring reach, you’ll be able to adjust your content accordingly to reach your target audience, and you’ll find what works best for each social media platform’s algorithm.
- Conversion Rate
This social media metric shows the true value of your social media content and shouldn’t be overlooked.
Ultimately you want the content you create on social media to reach customers and eventually convert into sales, so it’s paramount that this social media metric is tracked.
Take a look at our handy guide on how to increase your social media presence – the more customers you can attract to your social media platforms, the more likely these can convert to sales for your business.
Consider hiring a web analytics specialist to help you sync your social media pages and Google Analytics dashboard to track these metrics.
- Engagement Rate
Engagement rate is a social media metric that is used to measure how involved your audience is with your content and how effective your brand campaigns are. “Engaged” customers typically interact with your content by liking, favouriting, saving, commenting, and sharing posts.
High engagement rates will indicate your audience’s health and awareness of your brand, whereas poor engagement shows that there’s probably more you should be doing with your content.
With Instagram and Tiktok in particular, monitoring the amount of “saves” and “favourites” on these platforms is an invaluable way of understanding your audience and which content prompts the highest engagement. This will help develop your future social media marketing strategy.
Discover talented Social Media Strategists on PeoplePerHour to help increase your engagement rate.
- Audience Growth Rate
Audience Growth Rate measures how many new followers your brand gets on social media within a set period of time. This metric looks at your new followers as a percentage of your total audience.
Social media network TikTok has experienced 105% user growth over the last few years, which means if you create content on video streaming sites like this, you’re likely to witness an increase in your audience following too!
Check out our guide on creating a killer social media strategy for more hints and tips.
- Video Completion Rate
There’s a reason why video content has grown in popularity over the past couple of years.
Video completion rate is a key feature of many social media algorithms (e.g. TikTok & Instagram), so this metric is an important one to track and think about improving in your social media strategy.
If you find that people are actually watching your videos all the way through to the end, it’s a good indicator of how well your content is connecting with your audience!
Find a video content creator on PeoplePerHour.
- Amplification Rate
The amplification rate is the ratio of shares per post against the overall number of followers. It is essentially the rate at which your followers take your content and share it through their networks.
According to Neil Patel, this is an important metric to consider. This is because you can see what type of content is doing well and what content isn’t doing as well. The higher the amplification rate the more followers you gain expanding your reach.
- Virality Rate
This is a similar metric to the amplification rate, however, it calculates shares as a percentage of impressions rather than a percentage of followers. Every time that someone shares your content, it achieves a new set of impressions via their audience. It looks at how your content is spreading quickly.
Let’s sum it all up…
Overall, there are plenty of social media metrics out there to track but in this guide, we’ve put together the top 8 that we think are the most important. Tracking these metrics should give you a good overview of your social media performance for your business.
If you want advice from a professional, check out our talented Social Media and SEO experts on PeoplePerHour.
