A Few of the Social Media Metrics That Actually Matter

You don’t need to track everything. There are a few basic social media metrics that most marketers agree are important, but the rest of your metrics report should be determined by your goals! Be smart about this, and you won’t waste time generating report after report that never gets read or used.

Here are some key things you need to be tracking and why:

The must-haves:

Follower quality: Followers do matter… to a point. Tracking how many followers you have on each social media channel is expected, and your team will probably ask you about it. But tracking who your followers actually are takes it to the next level. Pick a regular cadence, like weekly, to review and write down who is actually hitting that follow button on your account, and consider if these accounts are real people (not bots) who fit your target audience profile.

Mentions: Tracking who mentions you across platforms is important for similar reasons. Are you reaching the right people, and are they talking about your brand in the right way? Most social platforms will alert you to who is tagging you through your notifications, and some (like Twitter) will count the number of mentions for you, but it’s worth using your social media listening skills to actually see the context of those mentions and stay aware of the conversation about your brand.

You can also note finer details about the posts that mention you, like what time they’re posted and what kind of ensuing conversation those posts generate, to refine your strategy even more. Knowing that your brand is mentioned regularly on Sunday nights might inspire you to launch new campaigns on the weekend, or to start a podcast that releases new episodes on Sunday mornings. Think strategically!

Things your boss will ask you about:

Follower count: Yup, you should track how many new followers you gain each week, on each platform. It’s expected, and it IS valuable information, since you should note the weeks when audience growth plateaus or when there’s a sudden drop in followers. But don’t get hung up on how many followers you have to the point where you no longer care about the quality of those followers.

If all you want is a big audience, and you don’t care whether that audience is made up of real people or if they engage with you or actually buy your stuff, just buy more followers and be done with it. For some brands, the appearance of a large audience is all they really need; their customers are found elsewhere.

But if your goal is to reach real people and inform or persuade or entertain them, the quality of your followers matters. Otherwise the work you put in to creating excellent content is wasted.

One other note on follower count: If you notice on one of your social platforms that, despite all of your hard work and effort, you just aren’t building any kind of audience at all… consider dropping that platform. It might not be the right fit for you.

Engagement rate: This seems important to track, but the problem with measuring engagement rate is that it’s not specific enough. Engagement includes anything from likes to shares to clicks on your website to comments. What kind of engagement matters to you? Why? Is all engagement important, or is negative engagement something you want to avoid?

For social media to be a worthy investment of time and money for your business, you need to be tracking the numbers that actually help you hit your business goals. So dig deeper, and regularly track a more specific type of engagement, like website clicks, that tells you if your audience is engaging with you for the right reasons and in the right ways.

And don’t forget to review engagement on a post-level, rather than just measuring engagement overall; if you shared, let’s say, an inspiring image with no website link, it’s fine if that post got a lot of likes instead of clicks. Context matters, so get into the nitty-gritty details!

Valuable extras:

Brand sentiment: It’s not enough to track how many people are talking about you; you should also know the tone of those conversations, and be ready in case there is a surge of negative conversation about your brand that might become a PR crisis (eek!). Like we mentioned above, social media listening will help you do this, but a more efficient way would be to use a third-party tool that can analyze a lot of posts on an ongoing basis; our current affordable fave is Awario.

Traffic to your website: There are two ways to look at this. You can track which posts encourage your audience to click on a link to your website, which is good to know. But you should also log in to Google Analytics and see which social channels are driving the most traffic to your website overall, since you can also see how much time those users are spending on your site and whether they are clicking around to more pages once they get there.

It’s valuable to know that users who come from Instagram are more likely to spend more time looking at your stuff, and that users coming from Twitter might visit your site but immediately leave. There’s no point in measuring website traffic if it doesn’t lead to conversions of any kind, right? So, the moral of the story here is to include website metrics in your social media reports to get the full picture.

Need more info on social media metrics that matter? Sprout Social has an excellent primer on essential metrics to track for your business, and Hubspot has one that goes even more in-depth. But, no matter what you pick, remember: The metrics that matter are the ones that keep your business or organization alive.