Analysing your social media success is so much more than just obsessing over vanity metrics. Sure, it feels good to watch your follower count climb or to have a post receive an abnormally high number of likes, but these often aren’t the best indicators of how well your social media account is performing.
Here’s what you should be keeping an eye on instead.
Awareness metrics
Awareness metrics measure how visible your brand is on social media. Without awareness, engagement and conversions can’t happen – it’s the top of the funnel. Before someone can engage, click, or buy, they need to know you exist, so even if you’re focused on sales or leads, awareness still plays a supporting role.
Reach
Social media reach refers to the number of unique users who saw your content, indicating how far your content is spreading. If your reach is growing over time, it’s a strong signal that people are engaging enough with your content to trigger more organic distribution. Low reach can indicate that your content needs to be improved or your posting strategy rethought.
Impressions
Impressions track how many times that your content is displayed, reporting the number of total views it has (including repeat views). Impressions can help evaluate how well algorithms are pushing out your content. If impressions are low, then your content likely isn’t being prioritised by the platform, or it isn’t receiving a high enough engagement rate to be pushed further.
By comparing impressions vs. reach, you can learn how frequently your audience sees your content (impressions / reach = frequency). For example, a piece of content with 10,000 impressions and 2,500 reach has been seen an average of four times per unique user (10,000 / 2,500 = 4). Understanding how frequently unique users are seeing a piece of content can be useful for campaigns that benefit from increased exposure, like promotions or launches.
Follower growth rate
Tracking your number of followers can be fun, but it isn’t the most useful metric to watch. Instead, monitor your follower growth rate (the percentage increase in followers over time). Unlike total follower count, the growth rate shows whether your social presence is improving, plateauing, or declining, which is a key indicator of your brand’s ability to attract and retain attention.
Engagement metrics
Once people have seen your content, you want them to interact with it – engagement metrics report on these interactions. When users engage with a piece of content, the social media platform takes that as a sign that the content is valuable / entertaining / important, and is therefore more likely to push the content to a wider audience.
Interactions: likes, comments, shares, saves
Understanding how users interact with your content is a great indication of how different types of content are perceived by your audience. Each metric can indicate a unique type of user intent:
- Likes are a lightweight form of engagement – easy, but still meaningful. It shows that users had a positive response or sense of approval of your content.
- Comments show that your content sparked conversation, curiosity, or emotion. Users took the time to share their thoughts or ask questions, reflecting deeper interest and emotional investment, and helping to build community and connection with your brand.
- Shares indicate that users found your content valuable or entertaining enough to spread with their friends, family, or own social media following. This can signal high relevance, and helps to drive organic reach and brand exposure.
- Saves can show that your content is so useful, inspiring, or important, people want to revisit it later, suggesting lasting value, not just momentary interest.
Engagement rate
Engagement rate is calculated by (total number of interactions / total number of followers) x 100. It shows how well your content performs relative to your audience size.
For example, a social media post with 1,000 total interactions may seem more impressive than a post with only 200 (that’s vanity metrics for you!), but engagement rate can tell a different story. If the post with 1,000 interactions came from an account with 100,000 followers, its engagement rate is only 1%. If the post with 200 interactions came from an account with 20,000 followers, that’s an engagement rate of 10%. While the total amount of interactions is smaller, the latter post actually had a much larger portion of its audience engage, proving it to be a more successful piece of content in this aspect.
Conversion metrics
So far, we’ve covered metrics that show visibility and engagement, but what about tracking whether your social media efforts are actually driving results? Conversion metrics connect your content and campaigns to real business outcomes and measurable goals, such as leads, sales, or signups.
Click-through rate (CTR)
If your social media post includes a link to your website, whether it’s your home page, blog, or product page, you’ll want to monitor any instances that a user clicks the link. If your goal is to get users to the website, a higher number of impressions without any clicks is a pretty useless result.
The formula for CTR is (clicks / impressions) x 100. A high CTR can indicate that your message is compelling, your visuals grab users’ attention, and your call-to-action (CTA) is clear and persuasive. A low CTR may mean that your post is often being scrolled past, perhaps due to a weak offer or poor visuals, or perhaps your target audience isn’t being reached.
Conversion rate
Once you’ve driven social media users to your website, what are they doing? You may have a high CTR, but are they completing the desired action once reaching your site? Monitoring conversion rate is a great way to assess the effectiveness of your social media campaigns.
A high conversion rate can indicate that your social media content is attracting qualified and interested audiences, and delivering clear, compelling offers or CTAs. If your CTR is high but conversion rate is low, your landing page might need some tweaks. If both CTR and conversion rates are low, your content or targeting might need improvement. Comparing these two metrics allows you to fine-tune every stage of your customer journey.
The exact recipe of social media metrics that you should be monitoring will vary depending on your brand and its unique goals and objectives. But, whatever you do, don’t get caught up chasing vanity metrics when there are plenty of more valuable aspects to be tracking.
