5 Important Social Media Metrics Your Business Needs To Track

important social media marketing metrics track

Social media presence has become an essential factor for every business that seeks to succeed in the market. The main reason social media platforms are so popular among various companies is that they allow them to directly engage with their target audience and promote their business over social networks. 

However, simply having profiles or pages on social media isn't enough to effectively establish a good presence. As a matter of fact, businesses must regularly engage their audience and maintain the relationships with them as well. 

Introduction To Social Media Metrics

In order to measure the success of social media efforts, many companies leverage various analytics and track important metrics. That way, companies can test their strategies and ensure those strategies are driving viable business goals. Still, there are plenty of metrics available for tracking. Many companies can easily lose track of what's important by solely focusing on vanity metrics instead of focusing on those that bring actual value. 

Having an accurate, simple, and comprehensive social media dashboard can make tracking your analytics much easier. That being said, here are a few important social media metrics your business needs to track. 

Social Media Following 

Every business needs to track their social following. This social media metric indicates the number of followers you have on each social network your company has a presence on. This metric on its own doesn't show you much but it directly ties to other relevant metrics your business needs to track. For instance, it will help you track follower growth over the course of your social media marketing campaign. 

Even if your business is on a tight budget, you can still grow your social following through various activities. However, you must track follower growth to determine if your efforts are bearing fruit in the first place. As an example, Facebook allows you to track followers and their growing numbers through their insights page. As for Twitter, you can track followers through Twitter analytics on your account page. 

The 5 Important Social Media Marketing Metrics To Track

1. Volume Metrics 

The volume metric will help you understand the overall interest your target audience has about your company. In other words, it shows you the scope of conversations about your business. After all, people prefer to socialize on social media, which means they'll talk about their preferences and dislikes. This metric will not only show you the number of posts or tweets but also the number of people who are talking about your company, as well as the number of messages regarding a topic. 

However, the key of this metric is identifying unique people who posted something about your company on their walls, as well as helping you learn at which specific time the volume is at its highest. Facebook, for instance, has a unique metric regarding this called "people talking about this". This metric can help determine the right approach to boost engagement in your target audience. 

2. Social Mentioning Metrics

If you're already tracking conversations and volume, you might as well leverage social media analytics to their fullest potential. You can gain a deeper insight into these conversations by tracking social mentioning metrics. This metric allows you to track conversations where your company is being mentioned and determine the sentiment in which it's being mentioned, such as negative, positive or neutral on social networks

This is crucial for maintaining your reputation on social media platforms, as well as for understanding what your audience thinks about your company. You can leverage the information you've obtained from social media mentions to improve your efforts and address any negative reviews before the situation goes out of hand. 

What's more, you can engage in conversations where your company is being mentioned, in order to further boost engagement or promote something to your audience. In essence, this metric is very important for measuring your overall success on social media. 

3. Content Reach Metrics

It's no secret that content is the key to social media success. Publishing relevant content to your audience has a purpose of boosting their engagement by informing, educating or entertaining them. You'd also want to determine how far does your content goes in terms of reaching people on social networks. This metric can show you precisely that and even more. Reach will help you understand the context of your content and how effective it is at reaching a broader audience. 

For instance, if your content is effective enough it will go viral over social media and it will reach a great number of people, thus increasing your consumer base and social following. What's more, reach complements other metrics results, especially those concerning engagement levels. For example, if you take the number of shares, likes, clicks or replies and divide them by your reach number, you can effectively measure engagement levels for a particular piece of content or for a specific activity. 

For business videos you want to check views, watch time, and engagement rates. These social media marketing metrics and targets will vary depending on whether they are on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Vimeo, Snapchat, or other platforms.

4. Engagement Metrics 

Engagement is one of the most important metric your business should be tracking. Engagement levels directly reflect the success of your social media efforts and strategies. It measures how people react to your activities and your posts. In order to effectively measure engagement levels, you have to track, likes, shares, tweets, replies, comments and other engagement related activities. 

That way you can determine how your efforts, such as content publishing, for example, are resonating with your audience. What's more, you can determine how willing your audience is to further engage a topic or news. The more engaged your audience is the more chances of improving conversions and driving important business goals

5. Traffic Generation Metrics

A lot of social media marketing managers just track followers and likes, but those numbers are often superficial (if not completely fake) and don't necessarily guarantee results. It's best to focus more on the amount of traffic driven from social media marketing. That SMM website traffic guarantees you a shot at converting visitors into qualified leads or paying customers. And if nothing else, it can help give you a little boost in advertising revenue or increased PageRank (Google notices bumps in overall traffic). 

While more website visitors from social media doesn't necessarily guarantee sales, at that point it really comes down to your website / blog content or landing page setup to convert. If that isn't good enough to convert site visitors, then no amount of social media marketing can help you.

Maximize Your Social Media Marketing With Metrics

Social media metrics should be an integral part of your social media marketing and presence. If you don't measure the effectiveness of your efforts, you cannot know if the strategies you've implemented will be successful or not. Start tracking your social media marketing and making adjustments and your digital marketing will improve drastically!


I hope you enjoyed this blog post about the most important social media marketing metrics your company needs to track.

Interested in more articles about strengthening your social selling?

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How To Use Social Media To Build Better Brand Trust

The Best Social Media Marketing Tools

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