The Most Important Social Media Metrics to Grow Your Brand

The Most Important Social Media Metrics to Grow Your Brand

When you’re working to grow your online presence, it’s important to understand if your strategy and efforts are working. So, you need to pay attention to key social media metrics to determine if you need to continue full steam ahead or make some adaptations.

Some social media metrics are purely vanity metrics, but others are ideal for letting you know if you’re really growing as a brand and as an online community.

We’ve put together a list of the 5 most important social media metrics you need to track to grow your brand.

What Are Social Media Metrics?

First things first, let’s cover the basics. What are social media metrics? And why are social media metrics important?

Social media metrics include KPIs like how many people your content reaches, how much traffic you are generating, and how many new customers are buying due to your efforts.

These are important to track so that you know whether your social media strategy is helping your bottom line. You don’t want to blindly use up time and resources in creating and promoting content without knowing if it’s performing well.

Tracking the number of people your content reaches and how many of those people visit your website or convert into customers is essential to grow.

Ideally, your team will have put together a social media report to provide an overview of your social media efforts. Now, keeping an eye on certain metrics will help make your job easier.

There are so many different social media metrics that you can track, but which are the most important?

Let’s dive in to learn more about the specific metrics that help to showcase whether you’re seeing success or not.

5 Social Media Metrics to Track to Grow Your Brand

While there are a lot of different metrics you might want to track to check the health of your strategy, some are more important than others.

And today, we want to cover the 5 most important social media metrics that can help you figure out whether your strategy is working or not.

Ready?

1. Reach

The first metric you want to track is your reach, or the number of people that have seen your content. Track the reach for each of your posts, campaigns or overall reach in order to see if your audience likes the content you’re putting out.

Take a look at your likes or followers for each platform and compare them to your reach to see what percentage of your known audience is finding your content. 

While most social media algorithms only show your content to a small percentage of your audience, monitoring your reach can help you see if that percentage is growing or – better yet – if your post is reaching people who aren’t yet in your audience.

Most social platforms have built-in analytics that will showcase your reach across all of your posts during a certain time frame as well as the reach that specific posts got.

Here’s what this looks like in Facebook analytics.

facebook analytics

Pay attention to fluctuations to see if your audience likes certain types of content more than others. This will help you create and promote more of what your followers want to see. 

2. Engagement

The next social media metric you want to track is engagement. Engagement refers to the actual interactions that the people who view your post take, whether it’s likes, comments or shares.

This metric is more telling than reach because it includes the people who not only saw your content, but felt compelled to engage with it.

So for example, you could be reaching 10% of your total audience with your social media content, but if no one is actually engaging with your content, it’s likely missing the mark. So while reach matters, engagement is even more revealing.

You can look at your engagement at a granular level by seeing how many likes, comments or replies, shares or retweets, etc., you received per post, or you can calculate your engagement rate from a post.

Engagement rate can be calculated by adding up all of the interactions with a single post, dividing that by your total number of followers on that platform and multiplying by 100 to get a percentage.

Some platforms, like we see below in Twitter analytics, will even calculate the engagement rate for you, making it even easier to put together your social media report.

twitter analytics

Engagement is even more telling when it comes to the content your audience likes, so pay close attention to the posts that generate a lot of interaction and do your best to replicate that in your strategy.

3. Amplification

Amplification refers to the amount of shares that your social media content gets. 

This metric is valuable because when your audience shares your content, your brand is reaching an audience that it might not have otherwise, helping to grow your following and your bottom line as a company.

Essentially, your amplification rate focuses on a specific type of engagement, helping to give your team an idea of how much your reach might be expanded into other networks.

To calculate your amplification rate, take a look at just the post’s shares or retweets. Divide that number by your total followers before multiplying by 100 to get the percentage rate.

4. Clicks

Another critical social media metric to track is the number of clicks each of your posts generate to your website. 

For many types of posts, their main goal is simply to get viewers to click over to your website to learn more, whether it’s an educational blog post or a more commercial sales landing page.

So when you dive into your social media analytics, these are the posts where you really want to focus on the number of clicks that they’re leading to your website.

You can also take a look at your website analytics to see the amount of traffic that social media is sending to your website in general.

In Google Analytics, head over to the Acquisition tab and check Channels to find out how many people have found your website from social media, whether it’s your own posts or other social posts your audience has shared.

google analytics

5. Conversions

The final social media metric we’re going to cover today is, of course, conversions. Conversions refer to the number of paying customers that are generated directly as a result of your social media efforts.

This is the biggest indicator of ROI for your time and resources spent on social media marketing. While all of these other metrics are important for growing your brand, building brand awareness and creating an online community, conversions pay the bills.

Unfortunately, due to the nature of social media, conversions can also be one of the hardest metrics to track – especially for organic social media strategies where pixels aren’t being utilized the same way they are in paid campaigns.

The best way to do this is to create URL tags specifically for social media sharing or use a URL shortener that’s trackable. From there, you can use cookies or goals in Google Analytics to track conversions from various organic social media campaigns.

Another important metric to pay attention to under this umbrella is your cost per conversion. When running ads, pay attention to how much you’re paying for each new customer. You never want this amount to be higher than your brand’s customer value.

Start Tracking Essential Social Media Metrics

Once you’ve gathered all of your important social media metrics, make them easy to build into your social media report with a comprehensive, live dashboard. This can help you to easily share and prove your social media performance and success.

Chloe West is a contributor at Keyhole. Chloe is a digital marketer and freelance writer, focusing on topics surrounding social media, content, and digital marketing. She’s based in Charleston, SC, and when she’s not working, you’ll find her at brunch or hanging out with her son. Connect with her on Twitter or LinkedIn.