What are social media metrics and why should you track

them?
Your social media goals are what determine your metrics. For every goal, you need a
related metric, which will help determine if your social strategy is hitting the mark or
not.

For example, your business goal may be to increase conversions. Therefore, your
social media goal becomes increasing conversions from those that visit your site via
posts that are part of your strategy. Now that you have a goal in mind, you can
clearly identify which social media metrics to measure and a time frame in which to
measure them. For example, increasing conversions from social by 25% in a three-
month span. To meet this goal, you decide to run a campaign that will include ads,
product tags and influencers. To measure this, you determine that you’ll look at the
social traffic and conversion rate metric from those posts in your website analytics.

Social media metrics are important because they prove you can measure how
successful a campaign is, how well your social strategy is performing, and ultimately
if you will have an impact on your overall business. Not only does having these
metrics give you an opportunity to showcase the impact of your work to executives,
but providing consistent social media metric reports can lead to major shifts for your
social team, including budget increases and increased access to resources. And last
but certainly not least, metrics keep you aware of general social profile and brand
health – you don’t know the impact of your social media presence until you have the
data to back it up.

Measuring the right social media metrics

Every social media platform has its own native analytics for you to dive into. For
Facebook, you’ll find them in the Insights tab. In Twitter, you navigate to Twitter
Analytics. In Instagram and Pinterest, you’ll need business accounts before you’ll be
able to see your data.

If you’re just starting out and have a low budget, visiting these native analytics
resources individually can be a good starting point.

In order to minimize the time investment of pulling metrics from all these sources,
find a social media analytics tool that fits within your budget and needs. The time
you save on manually creating reports and pulling together different networks’ data
will more than make up for the money you spend on these tools.

In Sprout, all plans come with presentation-ready social media reports, filterable by

platform and date. This means customized graphs and comparisons to a previous
date range are all easily accessible to you and easy to surface up to team leaders and
executives.

Whichever route you take, it’s essential to monitor and document your metrics
somewhere on a consistent basis and track your progress toward your goals.

Now that you know your goals and how to get your data, narrowing down metrics in
a sea of options can be a challenge. Social data is so vast. We’ve used conversions as
one example. However, what about some of the fluffier metrics? How should you be
using those? The answer is about tying the metrics back to your goals. If you’re
looking to drive awareness through publishing, how many impressions are you
driving? If you’re looking to build a community, how many people do your posts
engage on average? All metrics have meaning, it’s about interpreting what that
metric tells you and translating that back to your business goals.

Engagement: Likes, comments, shares and clicks

Engagement is a big umbrella category to track.

The engagement rate is a metric often used to track how actively involved with your
content your audience is and how effective your brand campaigns are. Engaged
consumers interact with brands through interactions such as “likes,” comments and
social sharing.

Engagement essentially boils down to how much audience accounts are interacting
with your account and how often. Every network will have some sort of engagement
metric that is a total sum of smaller engagement opportunities such as likes,
comments, and shares. Many platforms have more than one type of metric, or
different naming conventions, such as Retweets vs. Shares.

High engagement rates will indicate audience health (how responsive your audience
is and how many are “real” followers), interesting content types and your awareness
of your brand.
At the granular level, you’ll look at different engagement metrics:

 Likes, Comments, Retweets, etc.: Individual engagement metrics like a Share

or a Retweet add up. In a Twitter report, you’ll see a total number of
engagements per post or profile.
 Post engagement rate: The number of engagements divided by impressions or
reach. A high rate means the people who see the post find it interesting.
 Account mentions: Organic mentions, like @mentions that aren’t part of a
reply, or tagging a brand in an Instagram story without prompting, indicate
good brand awareness.

Like most metrics, looking at one engagement metric might not give you all the
context you need to make full decisions for your strategy. Looking at a combination
of metrics is a great way to learn more about what levers you can pull to meet your
specific goals. For example, a post that receives a lot of likes but not comments or
shares isn’t always bad. The post intention could’ve been to present a beautiful
image and a caption that isn’t meant to be a call to action. But, if there was a call to
action that encouraged comments and shares, then the lack of them could mean a
poorly performing caption.

Looking at the full picture is great as your devising your strategy, but keeping a close
eye on one metric in particular can really help you be more agile and pivot your
strategy quickly. Sprout’s Sent Message Performance report will break down each
post’s metrics but also provide an average or total at the top of each column. By
sorting these, you’ll find out which posts receive the most impressions and which
have the most average users engaged. If engagement is your goal, sorting by the
most engaged posts will help you find similarities among these posts, so you can
determine which elements of these posts appeal most to people and optimize your
future content.

Make sense of key metrics with Sprout

Once you know the most important metrics for every situation, make reporting
easier with Sprout Social.

Presentation-ready reports let you break down data across channels or on specific
networks to highlight social success.
Find out how easy it is to analyze your social strategy with a free trial.

Awareness: Impressions & reach

Frequently used but often confused, impressions and reach are each an important
metric to track, especially if your goals for social are focused around brand
awareness and perception.

If you’re using these metrics as benchmarks for your brand, it’s important to
understand the difference between reach and impressions.

At the post level:

 Impressions are how many times a post shows up in someone’s timeline

 Reach is the potential unique viewers a post could have (usually your follower
count plus accounts that shared the post’s follower counts).

While impressions can tell you a lot about the potential your content has for visibility
on social on it’s own, it’s still important to look at other metrics for ultimate
performance context. If you have multiple goals of both increasing awareness but
also of educating your audience, you’ll likely want to look for a combination of both
impressions and engagement. For a post that has a high impressions count but a low
engagement number (and therefore a low engagement rate), it likely means that
your post wasn’t interesting enough for audiences to take action after seeing it in
their feed. For a post with a high reach count and high engagement rate, it’ll likely
mean that the content went viral via Retweets and Shares.

In this example, the Tweet has a very high Reach because it has over 50k Retweets.
To calculate the reach, we would need to add up every account that Retweeted it
and their follower counts. The engagement rate is also high: it has thousands of
Replies, Retweets, Likes, etc. The analytics we can’t see from the public view would
include clicks to expand the Tweet, Quote-Retweets and profile visits. However, even
from what we can see publicly, this is a wildly successful Tweet.

Share of voice: Volume and sentiment

Share of voice is a metric often used in public relations, or as part of a competitive
analysis or paid advertising campaign. It indicates how much of the online sphere
your brand is taking part in. For example, if you’re a florist in Toronto, it would look
like how many people are talking about your brand online as compared to your
competitors.
Sprout’s listening features help you understand the volume of discussion for certain
keywords. Combined with a Trends report, you’ll be able to see what’s most often
associated with your brand and where you can improve or capture more attention.

Improving your share of voice is likely an ongoing goal, one that you measure by
benchmarking over time. Campaigns come and go, but your brand is forever. Unless
you’re the only company in your field, you won’t always be able to maintain the
biggest share of voice but you can keep track of how it ebbs and flows over time and
consider the factors for those changes.

ROI: Referrals & conversions

The easiest example of an important social metric and our first example of this
article. Most applicable for companies with websites or e-commerce platforms,
social referral traffic and conversions are tied to both sales and marketing goals, and
ultimately major business goals. To track these, you’ll need a publishing strategy that
incorporates UTM tracking and a website traffic analytics program like Google
Analytics or a built-in one if you’re on an e-commerce platform like Shopify.
In Sprout, you can link your Google Analytics account and it’ll display the traffic
sources and any Twitter mentions that have a link to your site.

Referrals are how a user lands on your website. In web analytics, you’ll see them
broken down into sources. “Social” is usually the source/medium you’ll be
monitoring, and then it’s broken down by network.

Conversions is when someone purchases something from your site. A social

conversion means they visited via a social media channel and then purchased
something in that same visit.

Hand in hand with referrals and conversions is the click-through rate (CTR) in ads
and posts. CTRs compare the number of times someone clicks on your content, to
the number of impressions you get (i.e., how many times the ad was viewed). A high
CTR means an effective ad. Note that CTRs differ wildly across industries, networks
and content types. Some common examples of areas where CTR is measured
include:

 Email links and call-to-action buttons

 PPC advertisements
 Links on landing pages
 Social media advertising
 On-site elements (buttons, image, etc)

It’s best to research industry benchmarks beforehand and then monitor your ads

and adjust accordingly.

Customer care: Response rate & time

We’ve been pretty focused on the performance of posts and social media accounts
but what about your customer’s experience with your brand? Additionally, what
about your own performance? Who’s watching the social media manager to make
sure they’re doing their job well and that customers are being heard in a reasonable
amount of time?

This is where metrics like response rate and response time come in. They track how
fast your team is responding to important messages and how many of them are
actually being responded to. For multi-user accounts, you should also track how
much each person is getting done.
In the Sprout Engagement report, you’ll see a variety of metrics that include
response rate and response rate, further broken down by day of week. If your social
strategy goal is to respond to everything within six hours and the report says
otherwise, then you’ll know what you need to work on.
The Sprout Team report shows the above metrics but sorted by team members. With
these metrics, you’ll be able to see who’s exceeding the expected time to respond
and whose published posts are receiving the most replies.

Conclusion
Among the dozens of social media metrics that are available to you to track, we’ve
compiled the most essential ones that matter for most businesses and most goals. To
recap, metrics are important because they tell if you a campaign or strategy is
successful over time. You can find metrics in your native channel analytics’s section
or through an all-in-one program like Sprout.

The most common and often important metrics to pay attention to are engagement,
impressions and reach, share of voice, referrals and conversions and response rate
and time. These combined will give you a 360º view of your social media
performance. With time and new goals, you’ll add new and more nuanced metrics to
make them more relevant to your business.