20 Social Media Metrics To Track a Successful Campaign

Updated June 24, 2022

Social media marketing is the practice of using social media to advertise to both existing and potential customers of a brand. Organizations often have teams dedicated to running social media marketing campaigns, which use metrics to determine the success of their efforts. If you're involved in the social media or general marketing of your organization, it can be helpful to understand what these metrics are and how they can help your team. In this article, we define the concept of social media metrics, discuss the advantages they provide and introduce 20 metrics you might consider tracking.

What are social media metrics?

Social media metrics refer to data that measure the performance of social media campaigns—coordinated marketing activities executed through social media platforms. These campaigns have goals, such as expanding brand reach, generating leads and sales, boosting web traffic or improving customer engagement. Social media metrics can reveal the extent to which an organization has or hasn't met its social media goals.

What are the advantages of tracking social media metrics?

There are several advantages that social media metrics can provide, such as:

Better understanding of your audience

Audience refers to the people to whom you target your brand. Social media metrics can reveal factors such as the type of content they're drawn to, what they're most likely to engage with and when they're online. You can use this information to produce higher-quality, better-timed content.

Insight into competitors

There are resources available to reveal some data about your competitors' performance on social media. Tracking these metrics can show you what types of content are successful or unsuccessful for them. You can learn from your competitors to avoid errors and find ways to appeal to other audiences.

Improved marketing strategy

Because social media metrics can reveal whether you're meeting your marketing goals, you can use them to adjust your strategy. If the metrics show that you're not meeting your goals, this might suggest the need to try different techniques or produce different types of content. Such fine-tuning can help you establish a consistently effective marketing strategy.

20 social media metrics to track

There are several categories of social media metrics, including:

Engagement: Engagement refers to your audience's interaction with your content.
Awareness: Awareness is how far your brand reaches.
Consumer: Consumer metrics relate to people's perceptions of your brand.
Conversion: Conversion metrics show how many people take action because of your content.
Activity: Activity metrics measure the performance of your social media team.

To gain a complete understanding of your social media campaign's effectiveness, it's important to analyze metrics from each category. The following are some of the most important metrics to consider:

1. Amplification rate

The amplification rate is an engagement metric that measures how often your followers share your content. It's represented as a percentage that shows how many people willingly associate with and promote your brand. A higher amplification rate can measure not only the extent of the loyalty your consumers have but also the potential reach of your brand.

2. Applause rate

The applause rate is another engagement metric. It refers to the number of likes, favorites or other approval actions your content receives. When an individual takes an approval action, it shows they like the content. If a piece of content generates a high applause rate, this suggests that producing similar content can be beneficial to your campaign.

3. Attention

Attention, also known as brand awareness, is an awareness metric that measures how many people your content has reached. This metric considers activity from all of your social media channels, not just one. You can measure it in terms of the number of shares, unique visitors and mentions your content has.

4. Average engagement rate

Average engagement rate is another engagement metric. It measures the number of engagement actions—activities such as comments, shares and approval actions—in relation to the number of followers you have. The higher the engagement rate, the more that the content has impacted or appealed to your audience. This, too, can be useful for guiding the types of content you create.

5. Brand mentions

A brand mention is any instance of a user mentioning your brand on a social media platform. As a metric, it can reveal a couple of important details. First, it's an indicator of relevance, as a larger number of mentions may suggest that consumers are actively discussing your brand with others. Second, it can be useful for qualitative research. Your social media team can study a sample of mentions to see what people are saying and how they feel about your brand.

6. Bounce rate

The bounce rate measures the proportion of visitors who visit your social media page but leave shortly after, without completing any desired actions such as clicking on hyperlinks and viewing further content. The goal is to minimize the bounce rate, which would maximize the number of visitors who engage with your page. A low bounce rate is a sign of high relevancy and interest to your audience.

7. Click-through rate

The click-through rate (CTR) relates to ads, links or calls to action, which are activities recommended to users in the content you post. For example, if you include a link in a social media post, every instance of a user clicking on the link increases the CTR. A high CTR suggests that your content and ads are relevant, useful or compelling.

8. Content rate

The content rate is an activity metric that refers to the amount of content your social media team puts out during a period of time. In social media, the primary content types are posts, videos and images. A low content rate typically relates to low reach, while a very high content rate might result in oversaturation of a brand. Through experimentation, it's important to maintain a content rate that maintains a strong social media presence while allowing audiences to process the content put out.

9. Conversion rate

In social media marketing, a conversion is whenever a user completes a desired action, such as subscribing to your page, visiting an affiliate link or signing up for a company newsletter. The conversion rate is a conversion metric that measures compares the total number of visitors to your social media page and how many of them perform an action you want. A high conversion rate might suggest that your content is interesting or convincing enough to influence a related commitment by a user.

10. Cost per click

The cost per click, or CPC, relates to sponsored advertisements. Every instance of a user clicking on your ad or banner is an instance of added attention. You can use the CPC metric to determine how much it costs you to keep an advertisement running on a social media platform.

11. Cost per thousand impressions

Cost per thousand impressions is also known as cost per mille, or CPM. It also relates to sponsored advertisements, referring to the cost you pay per thousand times that users encounter a piece of your content. CPM can help you evaluate the cost-effectiveness of your social media campaign in terms of exposure.

12. Customer satisfaction score

The customer satisfaction score, also known as the customer satisfaction rate, is a percentage that represents how pleased customers are with a brand's goods or services. The data for this metric comes by survey, specifically by asking customers how they'd rate their satisfaction with a product of or encounter with your organization. Though not strictly a social media metric, the customer satisfaction score is attainable through social media.

13. Followers

The followers metric refers to the total number of users who subscribe to your content on a given social media platform. This metric is an indicator of both your brand's reach and its potential reach. Each follower can lead to a conversion and also represents the possibility of spreading the brand through sharing.

14. Growth rate

The growth rate is an awareness metric that measures the speed at which you gain followers. A high growth rate shows not only that more people are aware of your brand but also that your audience is expanding at a fast rate. This suggests that your content has high appeal and attracts interest.

15. Page reach

Page reach is an awareness metric that measures how many people saw any of your content during a specific period. This metric is an indication of your social media visibility. A higher page reach suggests that you're posting content at optimal times, coinciding with moments when your audience is online. This can help to generate more engagement with your followers, which can lead to increased traffic to your page in the future.

16. Post reach

Post reach is similar to page reach, but it refers to a particular piece of content rather than your content in general. It, too, can help to evaluate the timing of your posts, but it's also helpful for analyzing content type. For example, if two separate posts are similar in their timing but one has a higher post reach, that might suggest the content was more interesting. You can use this data to inform your future content production.

17. Potential reach

Potential reach, also known as the estimated audience size, measures not how far a piece of content has reached but how far it might reach. This metric is important as a point of comparison for other awareness metrics. It's a highly variable metric that factors in the number of followers you have and the level of their engagement with your content. For example, if you have 500,000 followers, your base potential reach would be 500,000—the total number of people who could see your content. If a follower with 200 followers shares your content, your potential reach increases by 200.

18. Reply time

Reply time is an activity metric that measures the average time it takes for your social media team to respond to a question on your social media page or a direct message. A fast average reply time can improve engagement with your brand since it fosters conversation between the company and its followers. In contrast, a slower reply time might point to the necessity of re-prioritizing the tasks of the social media team or redirecting efforts toward engagement.

19. Share of voice

Share of voice can measure market share by comparing the number of users mentioning your brand to how many are discussing your competitors. This can be useful for determining your company's place in the competitive landscape. You can get a sense of your brand's share of voice through social listening, the practice of monitoring social media channels for mentions of your brand, and there are various social listening tools you can use.

20. Virality rate

Virality refers to the quality of going viral—spreading quickly throughout a platform through sharing. Virality rate measures this spread by comparing the number of users who've shared your content with the number of impressions it has received. A high virality rate suggests the content has reached and resonated with people beyond just your target audience.