Top 10 Social Media Metrics and How to Leverage Them

Social media can be a powerful tool for growing your business. When you make decisions based on your social media metrics, you can reach new customers, boost customer loyalty, strengthen your company branding, drive traffic to your company website, and increase revenue.

You can also use social media to recruit and retain top talent. For example, you can show why your company is a great place to work by posting about your company culture, brand history, and accomplishments.

Researching social media marketing strategies takes time, and you’re busy running a business. We did the research for you. Here are the most important metrics to track and how to use the insights to increase company performance.

The Top Social Media Metrics to Track

At the end of each month, it’s helpful to collect these metrics, compare them to previous months, and set your strategy for the following month.

1. Engagement

This is the number of people who are interacting with your content. Depending on the social media platform, you’ll look at views, likes, shares, mentions, comments, and tags.

You could gain valuable feedback from analyzing your engagement metrics. For example, you’ll get a clearer picture of your target demographic and see the type of content that resonates with your followers.

2. Reach

Reach is the number of people who could see your post. Your reach is typically your follower count plus the follower count of any accounts that share your post.

If your goal is to strengthen your branding and gain new customers, it’s helpful to consistently measure your reach. If your follower count and shares spike, try to see what makes that content work so you can replicate it.

3. Impressions

This social media metric represents the number of people who see your post on their feed. Most social media platforms show content with high engagement numbers in the feed.

If your goal is to strengthen your branding and gain new customers, it’s helpful to track your impressions and reach. If your impressions are much lower than your reach, consider creating social media ads or shifting the type of content you share to see what resonates more.

4. Referrals

Most website analytics platforms will show you where people are coming from, such as a search engine, another website, or social media. You can see how many referrals are coming from each of the most popular social media platforms.

You may want to spend more time creating content for your most popular social media platforms. Keep in mind that you don’t need to be on every platform. It takes time to create effective content. If you’re not seeing results from some of the platforms, you could divert your attention to ones that are driving traffic to your website.

5. Conversion Rate

This social media metric measures how many people are taking your desired action, such as signing up for your newsletter, visiting your website, or buying your products or services. Your conversion rate is usually calculated by dividing the conversion number by the referral number. If 10 people come to your site from social media and five people convert, your conversion rate would be 50 percent.

Your conversion rate is important because it shows whether your content is effective. If you are generating a lot of traffic, but your conversion rate is low, it might be a sign that you need to make some changes. For example, you may want to write more compelling calls to action, product descriptions, and other website copy.

6. Share of Voice (SOV)

This is the number of people who are discussing your brand compared to your competitors. You can count your hashtags, mentions, tags, shares, and comments for a given period and your competitors’ or industry’s engagement. However, that can be time-consuming and there are social media listening tools you can use to automate the process.

Look at your main competitors’ social media platforms to see what is and isn’t working for them so you can adjust your social media marketing strategy accordingly. You may discover new competitors to watch.

7. Brand Sentiment

Your brand sentiment is the main outlook people have about your brand. You can use a social media listening tool to automatically evaluate the posts and comments people make about your brand and determine if the sentiment is mostly positive, negative, or neutral.

You can use this social media metric to increase customer satisfaction by making changes based on the feedback you receive. Boost customer loyalty by responding to people who are fans of your brand. If you check your competitors’ brand sentiment, you can make adjustments to your business based on the negative and positive feedback.

8. Brand Mentions

Check the number of brand mentions you get each month to determine whether engagement is growing. Look at direct and indirect mentions and your brand’s hashtags. (It’s a direct mention if someone tags your company and an indirect mention if they say your company’s name or talk about your products but don’t tag you.)

Improve customer satisfaction by quickly responding to customer complaints. You may be able to increase sales by listening to your customers’ requests for new products or improvements.

9. Click-Through Rate (CTR)

This social media metric measures how many people click the link in your social media post. After using a link tracker to find out the number, divide it by the number of impressions for the post to get the click-through rate.

Compare the posts with high CTRs to lower ones to find out what resonates with your audience. Are they more likely to click when you have quippy copy, a high-quality product photo, or a sale that ends soon? Start posting more of the content that is getting clicks.

10. Audience Growth Rate

Your audience growth rate measures how quickly your follower count is growing. Start by finding out the number of followers you gained in a month. Next, divide that number by your total follower count and multiply it by 100 to get the percentage.

When you see your audience growth rate spike, try to find out the cause. It’s possible your engagement increased. Keep up the momentum by creating similar content the next month.

Use Your Social Media Presence to Strengthen Your Business

Now you know the most impactful social media metrics to measure and how to use the insights to gain new customers, build a loyal customer base, and reach qualified candidates. Continue to attract and retain top talent by implementing expert hiring and management advice from Monster.