The great thing about social media is that you can track almost every detail with social media metrics. The difficulty with social media is that… you can track almost every detail with social media metrics.
The art of measuring social media effectively lies in understanding which metrics are most important to your business based on your goals.
The number of metrics you track will depend on the size of your budget and the size of your team, as well as your business goals. Here are some of the most important social media success metrics to track in 2022.
Social media metrics are data points that show how well your social media strategy is performing.
By helping you understand everything from how many people see your content to how much money you make from social media, metrics are the building blocks for continuous improvement and growth.
Social media metrics tell you if your strategy is working and show you how you can improve it. They show how much effort and money you spend and how much you get in return.
Without metrics, you have no way to understand what is happening with your business in the social sphere. You cannot create an informed strategy. You can’t tie your social media efforts to real business goals or prove your success. And you can’t identify downtrends that might require a change in strategy.
Awareness indicators
These numbers show how many people see your content and how much attention your brand is getting on social media.
1. Coverage
Reach is simply the number of people who see your content. It’s a good idea to track the average reach as well as the reach of each individual post, story, or video.
A valuable subset of this metric is determining what percentage of your reach is subscribers versus non-subscribers. If many non-followers see your content, it means it is being shared, or it performs well in the algorithms, or both.
Source: Instagram statistics.
2. Impressions
Impressions show how many times people have seen your content. This can be more than reach because the same person can view your content more than once.
A particularly high level of impressions compared to reach means that people view the post multiple times. Dig around to see why it’s so sticky.
3. Audience Growth Rate
Audience growth rate measures how many new followers your brand gets on social media over a given period of time.
It’s not just counting your new followers. Instead, it measures your new followers as a percentage of your total audience. So when you are just starting out, getting 10 or 100 new subscribers a month can give you a high growth rate.
But when you already have a large audience, you need more new subscribers to keep that momentum going.
To calculate your audience growth rate, track the number of new subscribers (on each platform) during the reporting period. Then divide that number by your total audience (on each platform) and multiply by 100 to get your audience growth percentage.
Note. In the same way, you can track the progress of your competitors if you want to evaluate your own performance.
Engagement metrics
Social media engagement metrics show how many people are interacting with your content rather than just seeing it.
4. Engagement rate
Engagement rate measures the number of interactions (reactions, comments, and shares) your content receives as a percentage of your audience.
How you define “audience”can vary. You may want to calculate engagement relative to the number of your followers. But remember that not all of your followers will see every post. In addition, you can attract the attention of people who are not (yet) following you.
Thus, there are several ways to calculate engagement. There are so many, in fact, that we’ve dedicated an entire blog post to the many ways to measure engagement.
Landmarks:
These benchmarks are based on engagement as a percentage of subscribers.
- Facebook: 0.06%
- Instagram: 0.68%
5. Gain speed
Amplification Rate is the ratio of the number of reposts per post to the total number of followers.
Amplification, coined by Avinash Kaushik , a writer and digital marketing evangelist at Google, is “the rate at which your followers take your content and share it across their networks.”
Essentially, the higher your gain, the more your followers extend your reach to you.
To calculate the gain factor, divide the total number of shares of a post by the total number of followers. Multiply by 100 to get the gain as a percentage.
6. Virality level
Virality Ratio is similar to Amplification Ratio in that it measures how much your content is being shared. However, Virality Score calculates shares as a percentage of impressions, not a percentage of subscribers.
Remember that every time someone shares your content, their audience gets a new set of experiences. So virality measures the exponential spread of your content.
To calculate virality, divide a post’s number of shares by its impressions. Multiply by 100 to get the virality percentage.
Video metrics
7. Video views
If you’re making videos (you’re making videos, right?), you want to know how many people are watching them. Each social network defines what counts as a “view”a little differently, but usually even a few seconds of browsing time counts as a “view”.
So video views are a good proxy for how many people watched at least the beginning of your video, but it’s not as important as…
8. Video Completion Speed
How often do people watch your videos to the end? This is a good indicator that you are creating quality content that resonates with your audience.
Video completion speed is a key signal for many social media algorithms, so it’s worth focusing on improving it!
Customer experience and service metrics
9. Customer Satisfaction Assessment (CSAT)
Customer service metrics is about more than just response time and speed of response. CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) is a metric that measures how satisfied people are with your product or service.
Typically, the CSAT score is based on one simple question: How would you rate overall satisfaction? In this case, it is used to measure the level of satisfaction with your social media customer service.
This is the reason 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, ask your customers to rate their satisfaction with your customer service, and submit it through the same social channel they used to interact with the service. This is a great use for bots.
Add up all the scores and divide the total by the number of answers. Then multiply by 100 to get the CSAT score as a percentage.
10. Net Promoter Rating (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 formulated question: How likely are you to recommend our [company/product/service] to a friend?
Clients are asked to answer on a scale from 0 to 10. Depending on their answer, each client is grouped into one of three categories:
- Detractors: Score range 0–6.
- Passive: range 7-8 points
- Promoters: Score range 9–10.
NPS is unique in that it measures customer satisfaction as well as future sales potential, making it a valuable metric for organizations of all sizes.
To calculate NPS, subtract the number of supporters from the number of opponents.
Divide the result by the total number of respondents and multiply by 100 to get the NPS.
Return on investment indicators
What is the return on your social investment? These metrics will help you figure it out.
11. Click through rate (CTR)
Click through rate or CTR is how often people click on a link in your post to access additional content. It can be anything from a blog post to your online store.
CTR gives you an idea of how many people have seen your social content and want to learn more. This is a good indicator of how well your social content is promoting your offer.
To calculate CTR, divide the total number of clicks on a post by the total number of impressions. Multiply by 100 to get CTR as a percentage.
Landmarks:
These tests refer to the CTR of paid social ads, not organic content. You should track CTR for both types of content – more on how to do this effectively at the end of this post.
Source: Hootsuite Digital Trends 2022 Q2 Update.
12. Conversion rate
The conversion rate measures how often your social content triggers a conversion process such as a subscription, download, or sale. This is one of the most important social media marketing metrics as it shows the value of your social media content as a means of fueling your funnel.
UTM parameters are the key to tracking your social conversions. Learn all about how they work in our blog on using UTM parameters to track social success.
Once you’ve added your UTMs, calculate your conversion rate by dividing the number of conversions by the number of visitors.
Landmarks:
Please note that these conversion rate industry benchmarks apply to e-commerce (i.e. sales). Keep in mind that a purchase is not the only type of valuable conversion!
Source: Hootsuite Digital Trends 2022 Q2 Update.
13. Cost Per Click (CPC)
Cost per click or CPC is the amount you pay for each click on a social ad.
Knowing the lifetime value of a customer to your business, or even the average order value, can put that number into important context.
A higher customer lifetime value combined with a high conversion rate means you can afford to pay 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 of the social network where you advertise.
Landmarks:
These benchmarks are based on search ads, not social ads, but the numbers give a good indication of how CPC is changing.
Source: Hootsuite Digital Trends 2022 Q2 Update.
14. Cost Per Thousand Impressions (CPM)
CPM or CPM is exactly what it sounds like. This is the cost you pay for every thousand impressions of your social media ads.
CPMs are views, not actions.
Again, there is nothing to count here – just import data from your social network analytics.
Landmarks:
Source: Hootsuite Digital Trends 2022 Q2 Update.
Share of votes and sentiment indicators
15. Social Share of Voice (SSoV)
Social Voice Share 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 about you?
Mentions can be:
- Direct (with tags, e.g. “@Hootsuite”)
- Indirect (without tags – for example, “hootsuite”)
SSoV is essentially a competitive analysis: how visible and therefore relevant is your brand in the marketplace?
To calculate it, sum up each mention of your brand in social networks across all networks. Do the same for your competitors. Add both sets of mentions together to get the total number of mentions for your industry. Divide your brand mentions by the total industry mentions and then multiply by 100 to get the SSoV percentage.
16. Social sentiment
While SSoV tracks your share of a 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 analytical tools that can process and classify language and context. We have a whole post on how to measure sentiment effectively. In the next section, we’ll also give you some tips on tools that can help.
We have already talked a lot about how to calculate various social indicators. But where do you find data in the first place?
In this section, we will explain where to access the information needed to start calculations. We will also recommend some tools that will do the calculations and even the reports for you.
Native analytics tools
Each social network has its own analytics tools with which you can find most of the raw data needed to calculate and track your social media success. This is a somewhat cumbersome way to keep track of your social performance. But these tools are free to use, so they can be a good starting point for tracking your social performance.
We have a variety of guides to help you understand individual native analytics tools:
- Twitter Analytics
- Meta Business Suite (Facebook and Instagram)
- TikTok Analytics
Once you gather all your data and do the calculations, you’ll want to keep track of everything in a social media report.