Social Media Metrics That You Need To Keep An Eye On In 2024

As a digital marketer, one thing you know for sure is that success on social media marketing depends on always keeping an eye your social media analytics.

Today, we’re going to show you which are the most crucial social media metrics, why you should track them, how to use the insights gathered to optimize your social media strategy, and how Socialinsider can ease your analysis and reporting work.

Let’s dive in!

All the social media metrics that matter in 2024

What are social media metrics
Why checking your social media marketing metrics is important
How to track top social media metrics with Socialinsider

1. Awareness metrics
2. Engagement metrics
3. Conversion metrics
4. Customer care metrics
5. ROI metrics
6. Competitive landscape metrics

What are social media metrics

Social media measurement metrics represent data that is used to evaluate a brand's social media performance across different channels.

Why checking your social media marketing metrics is important

Regardless whether you’re in the middle of an unfolding marketing campaign or you’re just getting started, building the pillars for your marketing strategy, you know you have to look at data to anticipate your next steps.

Social media platforms are continuously changing, with a bunch of updates, algorithm changes and new features all the time.

That’s why you have to keep an eye on social media metrics to anticipate your next move when you plan your content strategy for your platforms.

Otherwise, how would you know how your brand performs on social media?

The effectiveness of a social media strategy lies in the values of your metrics. Checking social media metrics represents the best social media practices for professionals to track their progress.

In case something from your marketing strategy doesn’t work for you, your metrics will signal it.

Even if every social media platform provides some native analytics data, they are not offering you the insights you need for the most important metrics.

And that’s when you need a social media analytics tool that showers you with a bunch of data.

How to track top social media metrics with Socialinsider

Socialinsider is more than an analytics tool, featuring data for benchmarking, competitive analysis and campaigns’ performance.

In Socialinsider, you'll get data for Business Accounts on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube.

By switching from one platform to the other, you can see key metrics, but also specific metrics, depending on the social media channel you choose.

Tip: You can customize your platform-specific Summary dashboard to show only the metrics you're interested in.

A close analysis of the most important metrics helps you measure how fast your brand is growing and what you should focus on to fuel its growth.

By adjusting the message you want to convey to your audience about your brand and creating content designed to cater their needs is what will make a difference and increase the values of your social media metrics.

But first, let’s explore all the major social media metrics, cluster by cluster.

#1. Awareness metrics

These social media metrics focus on your current and potential audience. Consider checking these brand awareness metrics when you develop your next social media report.

• Brand mentions

This metric refers to the overall number of mentions your brand gets online in a specific timeframe.

To make a better sense of this metric, you need to go to your platform-specific dashboard in Socialinsider, in the Overview section and scroll down until you come across mentions data.

With Socialinsider, you can see your brand's mentions on Instagram and Facebook.

These in-depth details about mentions help you learn when users mention your brand and what is the context of their mention.

It's a pretty underrated feature although it can give you a lot of social media insights and ideas on how to address your community and why you need to improve your customer support.

Tracking mentions is part of your social media audit, helping you get a clear image of how users perceive your brand, products and services.

• Follower growth

As a marketer, there's not a more exciting notification than the one showing that you have some more extra followers.

However, what’s more important is who your followers are. If you sell roses and most of your followers are not interested in flowers, having more followers isn’t helpful.

Depending on the network, you can learn about age, income, interests, social habits (such as time of day they are active), profession, and more.

Ask yourself: Does this audience match up with what I’m trying to accomplish? Are they interested in my products and services? How can I stir up their curiosity with my products?

By tracking this metric on an extended period of time, you get to understand how many people resonate with your content.

You may notice that, from time to time, the follower growth metric can vary. Maybe some users followed you for s specific purpose, like a giveaway, and then they've decided to unfollow.

In case your followers growth dropped recently, it is a sign that you have to rethink your content strategy in order to offer them exactly what they're looking for.

• Reach

Social media reach is an actionable metric since it’s directly influenced by timing (when is your audience most active?) and content (what does your audience find valuable in your post?).

This metric accounts for the total number of unique users who have seen your post since it went live.

The fact that you can see your reach by post type helps you learn on which type of content you need to focus more. The one with the highest reach is clearly the type of content that attracts your audience more.

• Impressions

Next, we navigate to Impressions metrics. Impressions refer to the total number of times your content has been displayed, whether it was clicked or not.

This metric tells you that your content has been shown in someone’s feed.

A viewer doesn’t have to engage with the post for it to count as an impression.

The higher the number of impressions your posts get, the more suitable they are for your audience's needs and interests.

• SSoV or Social Share of Voice

SSoV measures how many people mentioned your brand compared to your competitors.

There are two categories of SSoVs:

• Direct - by tagging your posts through posts (e.g. @Socialinsider).
• Indirect - simply mentioning your brand without a tag (e.g., “Socialinsider”).

2. Engagement metrics

Engagement is the king of social media metrics. This metric gets split into a lot of other in-depth metrics that can help you craft better content, accustomed to your audience.

This is a big umbrella category to track. Think about social media engagement metrics in terms of how many people are interacting with your content. Engaged consumers interact with a post through likes (or other reactions), comments, and shares.

A high engagement rate means people really enjoy or resonate with what you’re posting.

Using an analytics tool like Socialinsider, you can keep track of your engagement for your business and understand how your brand performs on social media channels.

Getting consistent high levels of engagement is challenging, but some industry seem to be playing their cards right and succeeding. Such is the case of the education industry, that is the top engaging industry on both Instagram and TikTok, according to our 2024 Social Media Benchmarks.

Want to learn how they do it? We talk in depth about it in our article about social media in education.

• Engagement rate

Total engagement represents the sum of interactions, shares, and comments for the posts published in a specific timeperiod.

The engagement rate is calculated as total engagement divided by the total number of followers, all multiplied by 100.

The breakdown for engagement is by followers, by impressions, and by reach.

The engagement rate formula for Facebook

When it comes to Facebook engagement, social media strategists usually report engagement by followers since the engagement by reach is only available for the owned accounts.

The average engagement rate by followers on Facebook is calculated as reactions+comments+shares divided by the total number of followers, all multiplied by 100.

The engagement rate formula for Instagram

On Instagram, you’ll come across the same situation with the engagement rate by followers as on Facebook.

The engagement rate by followers on Instagram is calculated as likes+comments divided by the total number of followers, all multiplied by 100.

The engagement rate formula for Twitter

The engagement rate by followers on Twitter is calculated as likes+retweets divided by the total number of followers, all multiplied by 100.

The engagement rate formula for LinkedIn

The engagement rate by followers on LinkedIn is calculated as likes+comments+shares divided by the total number of followers, all multiplied by 100.

• Engagement rate per post by followers

This metric divides the average engagement by the number of followers the page has, all multiplied by 100.

• Engagement rate per post by reach

Engagement rate per post by reach is calculated as the percentage of likes and comments divided by the total number of posts for a specific time, divided by reach, all multiplied by 100.

If you want to get more data that could help you see which type of posts brings more engagement, you should also check engagement by post type.

By seeing this split depending on the type of content you post, you will know on what to focus your marketing strategy.

#3. Conversion metrics

At the middle of the funnel, there might be a request for information; at the end of the funnel, there's probably a sale.

These social media reporting metrics define how efficient your social engagement is. So you might want to ask yourself - How much of my social activity generated a conversion?

• Conversion rate

It represents the total number of users who take a desired action after clicking on a link in your post.

The conversion actions can be defined as the ultimate action you’d like users to take on your site: downloads, registrations, subscriptions, installations, etc.

In your Paid section from Socialinsider, by selecting your ad account, you can easily check metrics like CTR, CPP and CPM -  which help you understand how well you're converting your visitors into customers, and how much it's costing you to do so. s

• CTR or Click-Through Rate

CTR takes the number of clicks a post gets and divides it by the number of impressions.

A low CTR means you have a high number of impressions and a low number of clicks – and that your content isn’t resonating with the audience.

• CPC or Cost per Conversion

When all is said and done, how much did it cost to get that conversion? Take all the costs of the social media campaign and divide it by the number of conversions you got.

If you spend $1,000 and get two conversions, your CPC is $500. If your profit is $300, you have some work to do.

• CPM or Cost per Thousand Impressions

CPM is the amount you pay every time a thousand people scroll past your sponsored social media post.

• Bounce rate

This social media metric measures the percentage of users who clicked on a link in your social media post but quickly left the page without taking any action.

#4. Customer care metrics

We talked about the performance of social media posts and overall social activity, but what about your customer’s experience with your brand?

This is where customer care KPIs come in.

These social media metrics cover the most crucial stage of the customer journey. They measure how your active users feel and think about your brand.

• Brand sentiment

In this day and age, it's not enough to know how many people tune in to your content. What's more important is to find out how they really feel about your brand.

When doing a brand audit for social media reputation management,  to skip the headache of tracking this social media metric manually, you need a professional social listening tool to handle your sentiment analysis.

• Customer reviews/testimonials

These include any positive or negative reviews, comments, assessments, or endorsements your brand received over a specific period.

This is a really important social media metric to track. If your customers are happy with your product, chances are they will share their positive experiences with others.

• Customer response rate

Nowadays, social media is most people's go-to communication channel with a brand.

While sometimes the number of comments and messages received may get overwhelming, it's important to answer every last one of them -  or at least to as many as you can.

TIP: If you're one of those brands that get an incredible amount of messages and comments and you haven't done it by now - you should consider getting a community manager.

Let us explain a bit here - a community manager is in charge of supervising and replying to the community's questions and messages.

Back to the customer response rate - this particular social media metric quantifies how many of the messages received on your social accounts you have replied to.

Here's how to calculate it: divide the number of replies you've given by the number of people who engaged with your page and multiply it by 100.

• Customer response time

If the customer response rate calculates how many customers have received a response from your brand, the customer response time shows how faster those messages and comments receive a reply.

Obviously, the faster you offer a reply, the better.

On social, people usually expect to receive a reply from a brand within a couple of minutes.

What surpasses this time window starts to be considered a poor response time and threatens to affect a brand's image and its relationship with its customers.

• Customer satisfaction

As the name itself suggests, this metric tells you how satisfied customers are with a certain product or service.

#5. ROI metrics

Some of the social metrics presented so far are applicable exclusively for social media marketing and are more first-base social media reporting metrics.

However, if you want a more in-depth understanding of your social media efforts are paying off, you should also keep an eye on other additional, but equally important social media metrics.

Social media ROI is THE number one metric any brand focuses on in any kind of marketing initiative. That’s because it’s the best indicator of what generates success and business growth.

Drifting from this metric, there are a couple of less analyzed social KPIs that can offer helpful insights for an improved social media strategy.

• Top referring social channels

Getting traffic is one of the most important marketing objectives for many businesses. Mainly because when landing on the websites, customers are one step closer to buying the company’s products or services.

The top referring channels social media metric indicates what those social platforms that are most successful in driving traffic to your website are. All this data will be available to check anytime you want in your Google Analytics account once you set one.

By knowing this info, you’ll be able better to optimize your social media strategy in the future and focus on those social channels that are more likely to help you increase your sales and grow your business.

• Revenue from social channels

This is one of those social marketing metrics that will make managers and business owners listen very carefully when presenting your social media ROI report.

Of course, other metrics for social media marketing like followers, traffic, conversions, and so on also matter a great deal.

However, in the end, to prove the value of your social media work, the revenue from social channels is the ultimate social media metric that should be monitored and presented.

The key to doing excellent social media reporting is to analyze the most important social marketing metrics for every marketing funnel stage.

By constantly monitoring this social media metric, you’ll be able to shift your resources investment towards creating content for those particular networks that give you the best ROI.

6. Competitive landscape metrics

If your company is part of a highly competitive industry, chances are you want to focus on some competitive landscape metrics.

This type of social media metrics offer brand-level results that help you see your performance across multiple channels and understand how you stack against your competitors.

• Competitive brand metrics

Leveraging a practical feature such as Socialinsider's Benchmarks, you can see competitive landscape metrics such as audience size, reach, impressions, engagement rate and more at a macro level.

• Competitive brand sentiment

Performing a sentiment analysis of your own brand is crucial, but analyzing brand sentiment for your competitors is just as important. Using a social listening tool you can understand how people feel about other brand and begin to expose some of their weaknesses.

You may discover, for instance, that even though one of your competitors gets tons of engagement on their posts, it's mostly what we call "bad publicity", meaning that their content mostly generates negative sentiment or emotions.

• Engagement rate for content pillars

In some cases, you might need to do a granular competitive analysis based on a single metric for a specific campaign or social media content pillar. This will help you understand how you stack against your competitors when it comes to a particular topic.

Let's take an example. Many banks nowadays that have a solid media presence promote healthy financial habits, and their posts reflect this.

To see how your content on this specific topic compares, average engagement rate-wise, to that of your competitors, you can use the Strategy feature in Socialinsider to create a campaign and measure the results.

Final thoughts

To make sure you don’t miss out on any important social media metrics, you have to focus on those that bring you closer to success.

These social media metrics can help you better craft and adjust your marketing strategy according to your performance in a pre-established time frame.

With the insights your get about every metrics through the use of a social media analytics tool, you can build comprehensive reports, develop competitive analysis and benchmarking.

FAQs about social media metrics

1. What specific metrics do you consider when measuring the performance of a social media campaign?

For campaign analysis, consider tracking social media metrics such as reach & impressions, engagement, click-through-rate (CTR) and follower growth.

2. What is the difference between social media analytics and social media metrics?

Social media analytics refers to the raw data describing your social media performance. By tracking specific metrics, you can make sense of the data and narrow down your analysis.