5 Essential Social Media Metrics to Track in 2023

The power of social media is undeniable. These days, you do not have to be a celebrity to gain wild visibility and reach tremendous success. The name shares it as it is: today, media is owned by society –anyone can use social media's prowess to change their profile, career, or business trajectory for the better.

Social media can multiply sales, influence people, create brand loyalty, share stories with a broad audience in seconds, break down demographic barriers, catapult once relatively unknown brands or personas into household names, and even stir social change.

All these can sound promising to new entrepreneurs, long-time business owners, or anyone wanting to pursue growth through social media. However, setting out an effective strategy and maximizing the tremendous potential of this modern superpower only comes by understanding how it works. 

The roadmap to success in social media means knowing the exact metrics to track to determine if you're hitting targets or just creating virtual fluff.

With the many different things you can choose to track, measure, and analyze these days, figuring out which ones truly matter can be a challenge. Below, we compiled the top 5 metrics you need to observe in gauging your social media effectiveness:

1) Awareness: Impressions & Reach

Impressions and reach are vital metrics, especially if your goals involve building brand awareness and perception.

Reach is simply the base visibility –the number of people who see your content. It serves you well to monitor your average reach and the reach of individual posts, stories, or other content.

Impressions indicate the number of times people saw your content. Think about how a person might look at your content more than once.

You can also look at what percentage of your reach are followers vs. non-followers. If plenty of non-followers see your content, it means it's being shared, doing well in the algorithms, or both.

2) Engagement: Likes, Comments, Shares, Clicks

They say social media is more of a telephone than a television, meaning there must be interaction from both parties –creators and audience, for this technology to work. 

Engagement tells you how actively your audience gets involved with your content and how often. Do people find your posts interesting and take action when they see you online, or do they simply scroll you over? 

Engagement can be seen through comments, likes, reshares, mentions, tagging, etc., depending on the platform.

3) Audience Data: Insights and Growth Rate

Knowing your audience is a non-negotiable in social media success. You'll need to know your audience growth rate and audience insights.

Audience growth rate measures how many new followers your page gets on social media within a specific time. It's not a simple count of your new followers. Instead, it measures your new followers as a percentage of your total audience. 

Audience insights are about understanding that behind the numbers lie valuable and helpful information –who are these people or pages that see, like, follow, and share you on socials? Are you locking in your target audience, and is your definition of target evolving over time? Assess your audience's location, gender, age, education level, job title, etc. 

4) Conversion Rate

How much of your social media activity becomes converted into your desired actions or outcome?

Do people book your event, buy your product, and click play on your new video or podcast on a different platform?

Conversion rate is the metric most closely tied to sales and marketing goals –and ultimately, long-term business/career/page goals. 

5) Customer Care: Response Rate & Time

They say the best advertising you can ever have is a loyal customer or follower –and you can only create and keep this kind of loyalty through great CX (customer experience).

So, think about people's experiences when they message you, comment, or act on your CTA (call-to-action) on social media. Are they treated well? Are they heard? Do they get a response soon enough? Or do you deliver crappy experiences that lead to unfollows, unlikes, and deletes?

Indeed, there might be other things you want to track but the five above are a pretty solid and necessary team to start with. Remember that like other metrics, looking at each alone will not give you the vital context to make better decisions for your strategy. Instead, we advise bringing all of these into a combination view so that you meet your specific goals. 

Level up your social media strategy –let professionals handle the work, book a discovery session with us today. You can also follow our socials for more tips and tricks at @studiosixteen.ph.