Social media metrics allow you to track every little detail of your social media performance. This is great for honing your strategy, but it can also lead to information overload.
Here, we’ve selected the top 17 metrics you need to track to really understand your social success and understand where you can improve. Where available, we’ve included benchmarks that will help you set realistic performance goals.
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What are social media metrics, and why are they important?
Social media metrics are data points that measure how well your social media strategy is performing — and help you understand how you can improve. They are like scorecards for your online posts and interactions, showing how many people saw, liked, shared, or commented on your content. Social media metrics also reveal how much effort and money you’re spending, and how much you’re getting in return.
This is not about vanity (or vanity metrics). Social media strategic planning and analysis require you to track metrics to understand what’s happening with your business in the social sphere.
Without metrics, you can’t create an informed strategy. You can’t tie your social media efforts to real business goals or prove your success. And you can’t spot downward trends that might require a change in strategy.
Keep reading for a complete list of social media metrics to track in 2023.
Social media engagement metrics
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Social media engagement metrics show how often people interact with your content. These are valuable metrics to track for a couple of reasons. First, engagement shows that your audience is interested enough in the content you post to take some kind of social action.
Second, engagement sends powerful signals to the social media algorithms, which can help expand your reach.
1. Engagement rate
Engagement rate measures the number of engagements (reactions, comments and shares) your content gets as a percentage of your audience.
How you define “audience” 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’t (yet) follow you.
So, 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.
One of the most common ways is to add up your total likes, comments, shares, and saves, and divide the total by your number of followers. Then multiply by 100 to get a percentage.
You can also use our free engagement rate calculator to measure your engagement rate by post, account, or campaign.
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Engagement rate calculator
Number of followers
Number of posts
Comments
Shares
Likes
Saves
Clicks
DMs
Your engagement rate:
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Note: If you’re calculating your account’s total engagement, include information about all your posts (e.g total number of posts published, total number of likes, and so on). If you’re calculating the engagement rate of a specific campaign, only include the details of the posts that were part of the campaign.
Instagram post engagement rate benchmarks:
* Education: 2.03%
* Financial services: 1.69%
* Government: 1.96%
* Healthcare/Wellness: 2.24%
* Travel/hospitality/leisure: 1.73%
2. Amplification rate
Amplification Rate is the ratio of shares per post to the number of overall followers.
Coined by Avinash Kaushik, author and digital marketing evangelist at Google, amplification is “the rate at which your followers take your content and share it through their networks.”
Basically, the higher your amplification rate, the more your followers are expanding your reach for you.
To calculate amplification rate, divide a post’s total number of shares by your total number of followers. Multiply by 100 to get your amplification rate as a percentage.
Facebook amplification rate benchmarks:
* Education: 0.05%
* Financial services: 0.06%
* Government: 0.06%
* Healthcare/Wellness: 0.08%
* Travel/hospitality/leisure: 0.03%
3. Virality rate
Virality rate is similar to amplification rate in that it measures how much your content is shared. However, virality rate calculates shares as a percentage of impressions rather than as a percentage of followers.
Remember that every time someone shares your content, it achieves a fresh set of impressions via their audience. So virality rate measures how your content is spreading exponentially.
To calculate virality rate, divide a post’s number of shares by its impressions. Multiply by 100 to get your virality rate as a percentage.
Social media awareness metrics
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Social media brand awareness metrics show how many people see your content and how much attention your brand gets on social media.
4. Reach
Reach is simply the number of people who see your content. It’s 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 reach for your page/profile overall.
A valuable subset of this metric is to look at what percentage of your reach is made up of followers vs. non-followers. If a lot of non-followers are seeing your content, that means it’s being shared or doing well in the algorithms, or both.
Facebook page reach benchmarks (30 days):
* Education: 273K
* Financial services: 164K
* Government: 497K
* Healthcare/Wellness: 170K
* Travel/hospitality/leisure: 366K
5. Impressions
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.
Impressions can be higher than reach because the same person might look at your content more than once.
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’s so sticky.
Facebook page impressions benchmarks (30 days):
* Education: 374K
* Financial services: 223K
* Government: 646K
* Healthcare/Wellness: 223K
* Travel/hospitality/leisure: 485K
6. Video views
Each social network determines what counts as a “view” a little differently, but usually, even a few seconds of watch time counts as a “view.”
So, video views is basically a good at-a-glance indicator of how many people have seen at least the start of your video.
Instagram three-second video view benchmarks:
* Education: 192.77
* Financial services: 48.42
* Government: 1.1K
* Healthcare/Wellness: 393.85
* Travel/hospitality/leisure: 259.28
7. Video completion rate
Video views are great, but 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’re creating quality content that connects with your audience.
Video completion rate is also a key signal to many social media algorithms, so this is a good one to focus on improving.
8. Audience growth rate
Audience growth rate measures how many new followers your brand gets on social media within a certain amount of time.
It’s not a simple count of your new followers. Instead, it measures your new followers as a percentage of your total audience. So when you’re just starting out, getting 10 or 100 new followers in a month can give you a high growth rate.
But once you have a larger existing audience, you need more new followers to maintain that momentum.
To calculate your audience growth rate, 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.
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Facebook audience growth rate benchmarks:
* Education: -0.81%
* Financial services: -0.72%
* Government: -0.32%
* Healthcare/Wellness: -1.64%
* Travel/hospitality/leisure: -2.65%
Social media marketing metrics
9. Click-through rate (CTR)
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.
CTR gives you a sense of how many people saw your social content and wanted to know more. It’s a good indicator of how well different types of content promote your brand on social.
To calculate CTR, 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.
10. Conversion rate
Conversion rate measures how often your social content starts the process to 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) as a means of feeding your funnel.
UTM parameters are the key to making your social conversions trackable. Learn all about how they work in our blog post on using UTM parameters to track social success.
Once you’ve added your UTMs, calculate conversion rate by dividing the number of conversions by the number of clicks.
11. Cost-per-click (CPC)
Cost-per-click, or CPC, is the amount you pay per individual click on a social ad.
Knowing the lifetime value of a customer for your business, or even the average order value, will help you put this number in important context.
A higher lifetime value of a customer combined with a high conversion rate means you can afford to spend more per click to get visitors to your website in the first place.
You don’t need to calculate CPC: You can find it in the analytics for the social network where you’re running your ad.
12. Cost per thousand impressions (CPM)
Cost per thousand impressions, or CPM, is exactly what it sounds like. It’s the cost you pay for every thousand impressions of your social media ad.
CPM is all about views, not actions.
Again, there’s nothing to calculate here—just import the data from your social network’s analytics.
Bonus: Get a free social media report template to easily and effectively present your social media performance to key stakeholders.
Social customer service metrics
13. Average response time
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. It’s the social media equivalent of time spent on hold.
Using AI customer service bots can significantly reduce response time for many simple requests.
If you’re using a social customer service tool like Hootsuite Inbox l, you can add response time directly to your analytics report.
Otherwise, you can calculate it manually by adding up the total amount of time taken for an initial response to customer queries and dividing it by the number of queries.
14. Customer satisfaction (CSAT) score
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.
Usually, the CSAT score is based on one, straightforward question: How would you rate your overall level of satisfaction? In this case, it’s used to measure the level of satisfaction with your social customer service.
It’s the reason why so many brands ask you to rate your experience with a customer service agent after it’s over. And that’s exactly how you can measure it too.
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.
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.
15. Net promoter score (NPS)
Net promoter score, or NPS, is a metric that measures customer loyalty.
Unlike CSAT, NPS is good at predicting future customer relationships. It is based on one—and only one—specifically phrased question: How likely is it that you would recommend our [company/product/service] to a friend?
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:
* Detractors: 0–6 score range
* Passives: 7–8 score range
* Promoters: 9–10 score range
NPS is unique in that it measures customer satisfaction as well as the potential for future sales, which has made it a valuable, go-to metric for organizations of all sizes.
To calculate NPS, subtract the number of promoters from the number of detractors.
Divide the result by the total number of respondents and multiply by 100 to get your NPS.
For more details, check out our post that dives deep into customer service metrics.
Other important social media metrics
16. Social share of voice (SSoV)
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?
Mentions can be either:
* Direct (tagged—e.g., “@Hootsuite”)
* Indirect (untagged—e.g., “hootsuite”)
SSoV is, essentially, competitive analysis: how visible—and, therefore, relevant—is your brand in the market?
To calculate it, add up every mention of your brand on social 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.
17. Social sentiment
Whereas SSoV tracks your share of the social conversation, social sentiment tracks the feelings and attitudes behind the conversation. When people talk about you online, are they saying positive or negative things?
Calculating social sentiment requires some help from a social media metrics tool that can process and categorize language and context. We’ve got a whole post on how to measure sentiment effectively.
Source: Hootsuite Analytics
How to set up a social media metrics dashboard
Each social network has a built-in social media metrics tracker through which you can find much of the raw data you need to calculate and track your social media success.
However, this is a somewhat cumbersome way to track your social metrics. Jumping between accounts takes time, and learning different networks’ native analytics tools can be confusing. That said, these tools are free to use, so they can be a good entry point to tracking social metrics.
We’ve got lots of guides to help you understand the individual native analytics tools:
* Twitter Analytics
* Meta Business Suite (Facebook and Instagram)
* TikTok Analytics
* LinkedIn Analytics
* Pinterest Analytics
If you need to present your results to your boss or other stakeholders, you can manually input the data from all platforms into a report. We’ve created a free social media report template you can use to track your data over time and present your findings.
Or, you could track all your social media metrics from Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Pinterest, and LInkedIn all in one place and easily create custom reports with a social media metrics tool like Hootsuite.
Here’s how to use Hootsuite Analytics to set up a social media metrics dashboard that calculates and measures your metrics for you.
* Log into your Hootsuite dashboard and head to the Analytics tab.
* Click New Report. Scroll through the various reporting options and templates to create a custom report template based on the metrics you can most about. Note that once you add these metrics to your social media metrics dashboard, you don’t need to remember the formulas anymore because Hootsuite will calculate them for you.
* Head to the Benchmarking section on Analytics and click Competitive Analysis. Choose your social profiles and add competitors to compare your performance to the competition.
* Also under the Benchmarking section, click on Industry, then choose your industry to benchmark your performance against your industry as a whole. This is the tool we used to gather the benchmarks listed throughout this post.
* Track your social media customer service metrics using the Team Activity tab.
Here’s a video that runs through some of the most important ways you can use the metrics in this post – and in your Hootsuite Analytics dashboard – to answer real business-oriented questions related to your social media performance.
Track your social media performance and squeeze more out of your marketing budget with Hootsuite. Publish your posts and analyze the results in the same, easy-to-use dashboard. Try it free today.
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The post 17 Social Media Metrics You Need to Track in 2023 [BENCHMARKS] appeared first on Social Media Marketing & Management Dashboard.
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