Social media metrics allow you to track every detail of your social media performance. This is great for honing your strategy, but it can also lead to information overload because there are so<\/em> many metrics and graphs to choose from.<\/p>\n To help narrow down your social media reporting to the most important data, we\u2019ve selected the top 21 social media metrics you need to track to understand your social success and where you can improve.<\/p>\n Follow along to learn more about the key metrics you need to track for your business.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n Bonus: <\/strong>Get a free social media report template<\/strong><\/span> to easily and effectively present your social media performance to key stakeholders.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n Social media metrics are data points that measure how well your social media strategy<\/a> is performing\u2014and help you understand how you can improve.<\/p>\n They\u2019re like scorecards for your online posts and interactions, showing how many people saw, liked, shared, or commented on your content.<\/strong> Social media metrics also reveal how much effort and money you\u2019re spending and how much you\u2019re getting in return.<\/p>\n This is not about vanity (or vanity metrics). Social media strategic planning and analysis require tracking metrics to understand your business\u2019s social media activity.<\/p>\n Without metrics, you can\u2019t create an informed strategy. You can\u2019t tie your social media efforts to real business goals<\/a> or prove your success. And you can\u2019t spot downward trends that might require a change in strategy.<\/p>\n Still stumped? Keep reading for a complete list of the types of social media metrics to track in 2024.<\/p>\n We\u2019ve broken down the 21 key social media metrics you need to keep an eye on into six different categories to help keep you organized. Follow along to get a better understanding of each metric and how to track it.<\/p>\n Social media engagement<\/a> metrics show how often people interact with your content. These are valuable metrics to track for a couple of reasons.<\/p>\n First, engagement shows that your audience is interested enough in the content you post to take some kind of social action.<\/p>\n Second, engagement sends powerful signals to the <\/strong>social media algorithms<\/strong><\/a>, which can help expand your reach.<\/p>\n Engagement rate measures the number of engagements (likes, comments and shares\u2014each of which we\u2019ll be explaining in more detail below) your content gets as a percentage of your audience.<\/p>\n How you define \u201caudience\u201d may vary. You might want to calculate engagement relative to your number of followers. But remember that not all your followers will see each post. Plus, you might get engagement from people who don\u2019t (yet) follow you.<\/p>\n There are multiple ways to calculate engagement. So many, in fact, that we dedicated a whole blog post to the many ways to measure engagement rate<\/a>.<\/p>\n One of the most common ways is to add your total likes, comments, shares, and saves, and divide the total by your number of followers. Then multiply by 100 to get a percentage.<\/p>\n You can also use our free engagement rate calculator<\/a> to measure your engagement rate by post, account, or campaign.<\/p>\n Note:<\/strong> If you\u2019re calculating your account\u2019s total engagement, include information about all <\/em>your posts (e.g., total number of posts published, total number of likes, and so on). If you\u2019re calculating the engagement rate of a specific marketing campaign, only include the details of the posts that were part of the campaign.<\/p>\n Psstt: <\/strong>Check out some average engagement rates<\/a> for various industries and platforms to see if yours are on track.<\/p>\n Your likes refer to how many people have physically \u201cliked\u201d or \u201creacted to\u201d one of your posts. While many people consider this as more of a vanity metric, it still plays a big part in your engagement rate.<\/p>\n Especially as more platforms (like Facebook and LinkedIn) introduce reactions, this metric will also help you gauge actual sentiment about each post. Are people laughing? Do they support your social media content?<\/p>\n Alternatively, you can look at the number as a whole to get an idea of how many people thought your post resonated well enough with them to take an action while they scrolled, no matter how minor.<\/p>\n If you\u2019re tracking your likes, you may simply want to keep a counter going to watch these engagement metrics grow. For example, look at how many likes your content gets each week and\/or month to make sure it\u2019s increasing.<\/p>\n Another great measure of engagement is the number of comments you receive on each of your posts. A like or reaction is a simple, easy action to take\u2014but leaving a comment means your audience actually has something to say<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Trish Riswick, Social Media Manager at Hootsuite, shares this sentiment: \u201cThe comment section is filled with inspiration and feedback, but it\u2019s also a great metric to track as it demonstrates the effectiveness of your posts and the increase in love from your followers.\u201d<\/p>\n This is another metric that you can track so you can make sure your comment section is growing over time. As your audience grows and becomes more invested in your brand, your comment count should grow, too.<\/p>\n This is the biggest indicator of how much your audience likes your content\u2014their interest in sharing it on their own pages so that their friends, family, and followers can see it.<\/p>\n Riswick explains, \u201cIn our 2024 Consumer Report<\/a>, we found out a lot about why people share content on social. The biggest reason (44%) is because people agreed with the post. 29% of respondents said they shared something because they found it informative. While 24% said it was because a post was inspirational.\u201d <\/p>\n However, Riswick notes that \u201cwhatever way you cut it, sharing a piece of content is an emotional response and a testament to how well your content landed<\/strong>.\u201d<\/p>\n Keep track of how many shares your content gets over a certain time period to make sure it\u2019s growing. If you ever see a drop in shares, go back to see what type(s) of content receive the most shares, and create more of that<\/em> content.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t Beautiful reports. Clear data. Actionable insights to help you grow faster.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tStart free 30-day trial<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n Reach or social media brand awareness<\/a> metrics show how many people see your content and how much attention your brand gets on social media. These are important social media metrics to pay attention to as they help you get an idea of how large your online audience is.<\/p>\n Reach<\/a> is simply the number of people who see your content. It\u2019s a good idea to monitor your average reach, as well as the reach of each individual post, story, or video. You can also measure the overall reach of your account.<\/p>\n A valuable subset of this metric is to look at what percentage of your reach is made up of followers vs. non-followers.<\/strong> If a lot of non-followers are seeing your content, that means it\u2019s being shared or doing well in the algorithms, or both.<\/p>\n Impressions indicate the number of times people saw your content. You can measure impressions by post, as well as the overall number of impressions on your social media profile.<\/p>\n Impressions can be higher than reach because the same person might look at your content more than once.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s so sticky.<\/p>\n Social share of voice measures how many people are talking about your brand on social media compared to your competitors. How much of the social conversation in your industry is all about you?<\/p>\n Mentions can be either:<\/p>\n Essentially, SSoV is like a competitive analysis: how visible\u2014and therefore relevant\u2014is your brand in the market?<\/p>\n Not sure where to start? Hootsuite\u2019s versatile social media management and listening tool can help with that.<\/p>\n Listening Basics allows you to use monitor conversations, SSoV, keywords, mentions, and hashtags, taking the guesswork out of your marketing.<\/p>\n However, if you want to go the manual way<\/strong>: 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.<\/p>\n Conversion relates to transactional actions, such as making a purchase or clicking through to your website from an ad or social media post. <\/p>\n While conversion is often used in advertising, being able to find these measurements organically is just as important.<\/p>\n Conversion rate measures how often your social content leadsto a conversion event like a subscription, download, or sale. This is one of the most important social media marketing metrics because it shows the value of your social media campaigns (organic and paid) in feeding your funnel.<\/p>\n UTM parameters are the key to making your social conversions trackable. Learn how they work in our blog post on using UTM parameters to track social success<\/a>.<\/p>\n Once you\u2019ve added your UTMs, calculate conversion rate by<\/strong>: dividing the number of conversions by the number of clicks.<\/p>\n Click-through rate, or CTR, indicates how often people click a link in one of your posts to access additional content. That could be anything from a blog post to your online store.<\/p>\n CTR gives you a sense of how many people saw your social content and wanted to know more. It\u2019s a good indicator of how well different types of content promote your brand on social media.<\/p>\n To calculate CTR<\/strong>: divide the total number of clicks for a post by the total number of impressions. Multiply by 100 to get your CTR as a percentage.<\/p>\n Cost-per-click, or CPC<\/a>, is the amount you pay per individual click on a social ad.<\/p>\n Knowing a customer\u2019s lifetime value for your business or even the average order value will help you put this number in an important context.<\/p>\n A higher customer lifetime value combined with a high conversion rate means you can afford to spend more per click to attract visitors to your website in the first place.<\/p>\n You don\u2019t need to calculate CPC: You can find it in the analytics for the social network where you\u2019re running your ad. However, the formula is still easy enough:<\/strong> divide your advertising cost by the total number of clicks.<\/p>\n Cost per thousand impressions, or CPM, is exactly what it sounds like. It\u2019s the cost you pay for every thousand impressions of your social media ad.<\/p>\n CPM is all about views, not actions.<\/p>\n Again, there\u2019s nothing to calculate here\u2014just import the data from your social network\u2019s analytics.<\/p>\n These metrics help you better understand your audience\u2014who it is, how large it is, and so on. This is important for improving your messaging and working on growth.<\/p>\n How many followers you have across each of your social media channels is another great metric to keep an eye on to ensure your presence is growing healthily.<\/p>\n Riswick says, \u201cWhat was once thought as a vanity metric was proven by our team this year to be very important. We found that 70% of people who follow a brand on social have explicit plans to make a purchase from them soon or in the future<\/strong>. Out of all the metrics, follower growth is also just a nice and quick way to see how your social media efforts are working.\u201d<\/p>\n Your follower growth measures how many new followers<\/a> your brand gets on social media within a certain amount of time.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not a simple count of your new followers. Instead, it measures your new followers as a percentage of your total audience. So, when you\u2019re just starting out, getting 10 or 100 new followers in a month can give you a high growth rate.<\/p>\n But once you have a larger audience, you need more new followers to maintain that momentum.<\/p>\n To calculate your follower or audience growth rate<\/strong>: track your net new followers (on each social media platform) over a reporting period. Then divide that number by your total audience (on each platform) and multiply by 100 to get your audience growth rate percentage.<\/p>\n Social media sentiment tracks the feelings and attitudes behind the conversation. When people talk about you online, are they saying positive or negative things?<\/p>\n Calculating social sentiment requires some help from a social media metrics tool that can process and categorize language and context. We\u2019ve got a whole post on how to measure sentiment effectively<\/a>.<\/p>\n Audience demographics<\/a> tell you details about who your followers are. Things like their basic makeup\u2014gender identity, age, location\u2014and some of their online behavior\u2014like the time frames they\u2019re online\u2014can be found within your social media analytics<\/a>.<\/p>\n Remember this as it can help inform your strategy, find the right times to post<\/a>, and direct your marketing messaging.<\/p>\n Posting video content on YouTube and other social media channels? You\u2019ll need to pay attention to these video-specific KPIs.<\/p>\n Each social network determines what counts as a \u201cview\u201d a little differently, but usually, even a few seconds of watch time counts as a \u201cview.\u201d<\/p>\n So that you know exactly what to track, on the main video platforms, a video is counted when someone watches:<\/p>\n So, your video view count is a good at-a-glance indicator of how many people have at least started watching your video.<\/p>\n Video views are great, but as we mentioned, they only let you know that someone started to watch your video. So, how often do people actually watch your videos all the way through to the end? Video completion rate is a good indicator that you\u2019re creating quality content that connects with your audience.<\/strong><\/p>\n Video completion rate is also a key signal to many social media algorithms, so this is a good one to focus on improving.<\/p>\n Your watch time refers to the total time that viewers spend watching your video content. It\u2019s an important metric showcasing how interesting your videos are to your audience, and a great metric to track to ensure growth.<\/p>\n Finally, we have a few metrics that focus on how your customers feel about your brand and its customer service.<\/p>\n Response time is a metric that measures how long it takes for your customer service team to respond to queries that come in through social channels. Think of it as the social media equivalent of time spent on hold.<\/p>\n Using AI customer service bots<\/a> can significantly reduce response time for many simple requests.<\/p>\n If you\u2019re using a social customer service tool like Hootsuite Inbox<\/a>, you can add response time directly to your analytics report.<\/p>\n Otherwise, you can calculate it manually by: <\/strong>adding up the total time taken for an initial response to customer queries and dividing it by the number of queries.<\/p>\n Of course, customer service metrics are not just about response times and response rates. CSAT (customer satisfaction score), is a metric that measures how happy people are with your product or service.<\/p>\n Usually, the CSAT score is based on one, straightforward question: How would you rate your overall level of satisfaction? In this case, it\u2019s used to measure the level of satisfaction with your social customer service.<\/p>\n It\u2019s why so many brands ask you to rate your experience with a customer service agent after it\u2019s over. And that\u2019s exactly how you can measure it, too.<\/p>\n Create a one-question survey asking your customers to rate their satisfaction with your customer service and send it via the same social channel used for the service interaction. This is a great use for bots<\/a>.<\/p>\n The formula: <\/strong>Add up all the scores and divide the sum by the number of responses. Then multiply by 100 to get your CSAT score as a percentage.<\/p>\n Net promoter score<\/a>, or NPS, is a metric that measures customer loyalty.<\/p>\n Unlike CSAT, NPS is good at predicting future customer relationships. It is based on one\u2014and only one\u2014specifically phrased question: How likely would you recommend our [company\/product\/service] to a friend?<\/p>\n 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:<\/p>\n NPS is unique in that it measures customer satisfaction as well as the potential for future sales<\/strong>, making it a valuable go-to metric for organizations of all sizes.<\/p>\n To calculate NPS<\/strong>: subtract the number of promoters from the number of detractors.<\/p>\n Divide the result by the total number of respondents and multiply by 100 to get your NPS.<\/p>\n Psstt:<\/strong> For more details, check out our post that dives deep into customer service metrics<\/a>.<\/p>\nWhat are social media metrics and why do they matter?<\/span><\/h2>\n
21 key social media metrics to track<\/span><\/h2>\n
Engagement metrics<\/h3>\n
1. Engagement rate<\/h4>\n
![\"average](\"https:\/\/blog.hootsuite.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/image2.png.webp)
\n<\/picture>\n<\/figure>\n2. Likes and reactions<\/h4>\n
3. Comments<\/h4>\n
4. Shares<\/h4>\n
![](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.hootsuite.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/HS_ProductImage-Analytics-1.png?ssl=1\"\/)
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t#1 Analytics Tool for Growth\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/span><\/p>\nReach metrics<\/h3>\n
5. Reach<\/h4>\n
6. Impressions<\/h4>\n
7. Social share of voice (SSoV)<\/h4>\n
\n
![\"Hootsuite](\"https:\/\/blog.hootsuite.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/Hootsuite-Listening-Quick-Search-620x288.png.webp)
\n<\/picture>\n<\/figure>\nConversion metrics<\/h3>\n
8. Conversion rate<\/h4>\n
9. Click-through-rate (CTR)<\/h4>\n
10. Cost-per-click (CPC)<\/h4>\n
11. Cost per thousand impressions (CPM)<\/h4>\n
Audience metrics<\/h3>\n
12. Follower count<\/h4>\n
13. Follower growth<\/h4>\n
14. Social media sentiment<\/h4>\n
![\"Listening](\"https:\/\/blog.hootsuite.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/Listening-powered-by-Talkwalker-_-Sentiment-over-time-620x345.png.webp)
\n<\/picture>\n<\/figure>\n15. Demographics<\/h4>\n
Video performance metrics<\/h3>\n
16. View count<\/h4>\n
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17. Video completion rate<\/h4>\n
18. Watch time<\/h4>\n
Customer service metrics<\/h3>\n
19. Average response time<\/h4>\n
![\"Hootsuite](\"https:\/\/blog.hootsuite.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/NEW-Inbox-copy-620x401.png.webp)
\n<\/picture>\n<\/figure>\n20. Customer satisfaction (CSAT) score<\/h4>\n
![\"customer](\"https:\/\/blog.hootsuite.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/image1-1.png.webp)
\n<\/picture>\n<\/figure>\n21. Net promoter score (NPS)<\/h4>\n
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![\"customer](\"https:\/\/blog.hootsuite.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/image3.png.webp)
\n<\/picture>\n<\/figure>\n