Social Media Metrics to Measure & Track (2025)

It’s undeniable that social media is a powerful tool for marketers. After all, an estimated 5.24 billion people use it these days. Using social activities to reach your customers and clients is important. Tracking social media isn’t just about numbers—it’s about knowing what works and optimizing for success.

Social media engagement can clue you into all kinds of user behaviors and insights, like what your customers (and detractors) think of your brand. It can tell you a lot about the kinds of ad campaigns that are successful and which ones are too expensive to continue.

New to social media analytics? This guide covers:

• How do you measure social media success?
• How do you decide what social media metrics to track?
• How do you calculate those metrics?
• How do you interpret the numbers once you have them?

Key Takeaways

• Measuring your social media campaigns’ impacts is more than a vanity metric. It’s how you track performance and meet goals.
• The metrics you prioritize vary by campaign and business goal. You may want to focus on reach, brand recognition, or conversions.
• Third-party tools often make tracking these metrics easier.
• Adjust and pivot your campaigns based on what you find out from these real-time insights.

Table of Contents

• Key Takeaways
• What is Social Media Measurement?
• The Most Important Social Media Metrics
  • Social Media Engagement
  • Reach
  • Social Media Referral Traffic
  • Share of Voice
  • Mentions
  • Lead Generation
  • Net Promotor Score (NPS)
  • Return on Ad Spend (for paid ads on social)
  • Virality Rate
  • Brand Sentiment
• The Social Media Measurement Process
  • Determine Your Social Goals
  • Choose Your Social Media Metrics
  • Measure Your Social Media Campaign Success
  • Adjust Your Social Media Strategy
• FAQs
• Conclusion

What is Social Media Measurement?

Tracking likes and shares is just the beginning—true social media measurement dives deeper. It’s the thorough, detailed tracking, gathering, and analysis of data from your social channels to assess your marketing strategies’ performance. It allows you to make detailed decisions.

There are two kinds of social media measurement:

• Ongoing analytics: This ongoing monitoring tracks activity over time. It lets you keep up with the conversation and vibes about your brand and company. Once you set it up, you can let it run and check in regularly.
• Campaign-focused metrics: When running a specific campaign with a concrete start and end date, campaign-focused monitoring lets you understand the impact of these initiatives. The metrics will vary between campaigns, depending on your goals.

The Most Important Social Media Metrics

It’s not enough to just track social metrics. You have to know which ones to track to optimize your brand’s performance, understand user behavior, and refine your strategy. There’s no shortage of options, and the reports you’ll get can sometimes make your head spin. Focus on these key performance indicators (KPIs).

Social Media Engagement

It’s easy to fixate on follower count, especially if you have a lot. Engagement is a much better indicator of success though. Engagement includes likes, shares, comments, and overall interaction. A high engagement tells you people are interested and often loyal.

You don’t need a fancy tool to track engagement. Just look at reposts, shares, and comments to see which content is performing best.

Reach

Reach measures the number of unique users who see your content. Reach measures unique users who see your content, unlike impressions, which count multiple views per person. Higher reach means your content is exposed to a larger audience. That’s a big deal for measuring your distribution strategies.

Tools like Mention and Hootsuite are great ways to track your brand’s reach.

Source: Hootsuite

Social Media Referral Traffic

Want to know if social media is driving real business results? Track referral traffic to see how many users visit your website from social platforms. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Bluesky can drive significant traffic. Monitoring referral traffic lets you see how social efforts contribute to website engagement, conversions, and sales.

Use Google Analytics to check your referral traffic and find which platforms are the biggest contributors to your site.

Share of Voice

Share of Voice (SOV) measures how often your brand is mentioned in conversations compared to competitors. More people talking about your brand often translates to a larger market presence. SOV is great for tracking brand awareness and competitive positioning.

Social listening tools such as Hootsuite or SproutSocial are useful for monitoring your share of voice.

Source: Sprout Social

Mentions

Mentions include direct (@tagged) and indirect references to your brand across social media. Monitoring your mentions can help gauge brand reputation and audience sentiment. High positive mentions often indicate strong brand recognition, while negative ones give you areas to improve. Always peek at mentions for opportunities to surprise and delight users and improve customer service.

Need help getting started? Sprout Social and Brand24 are social listening tools that track mentions.

Lead Generation

Engagement is great—but is it leading to sales? Social media can be a powerful lead-generation channel. Metrics like sign-ups, gated content downloads, and direct inquiries on these platforms can measure how well your social efforts translate into business leads.

You’ll likely need a powerful CRM like HubSpot to track your lead generation success.

Net Promotor Score (NPS)

Your NPS measures how likely your audience is to recommend your brand to others, which is a key indicator of customer loyalty and satisfaction. You’ll find your NPS by analyzing survey responses and direct feedback. A higher NPS means a stronger community of brand advocates.

Return on Ad Spend (for paid ads on social)

ROAS really counts for businesses running paid social campaigns. This metric calculates revenue generated for each dollar spent on ads. A high ROAS often indicates a well-optimized campaign. A low ROAS might suggest necessary adjustments in targeting, creative, or bid strategies.

Virality Rate

Virality rate shows how fast your content spreads—calculated by the percentage of shares relative to reach. Widely shared posts often mean your content resonates with users. Viral content typically has high organic reach and extends brand awareness outside initial target audiences.

For example, a social media post with 100 unique views and 20 shares has a virality rate of 20%. For each five unique views, your post has been shared once.

Brand Sentiment

Brand sentiment reveals how people really feel about your brand—positive, neutral, or negative. AI-powered tools can now categorize mentions as positive, neutral, or negative. That helps you understand how people perceive you and where you can improve.

HootSuite offers a brand sentiment analyzer that can help you determine how you’re doing.

Source: Hootsuite

The Social Media Measurement Process

Now that you know what to measure, how do you measure it? Let’s look at how you actually start to do this. First, you’ll need to find social media measurement tools that capture these metrics and start measuring. Some platforms have internal tools for analytics, while others might require third-party tools. You may even need to build your own with APIs.

Determine Your Social Goals

Before you look at numbers, think about your goals. What are you trying to accomplish with your social channels, and which platforms are most relevant to those accomplishments?

Let’s say you’re trying to do an influencer campaign heavily relying on video. In this situation, you’re probably not going to look at X or Facebook. You might, however, lean toward Instagram and TikTok.

Next, think about what you want your audience to do with that content. Are you trying to get them to buy things? Engage with your content? List out all your business goals. If you’re not sure what to target, consider looking at other brands in your space. A competitor analysis can help you decide.

Choose Your Social Media Metrics

Not all social media KPIs are created equal. Pick metrics that align with your business objectives and provide actionable insights. Have questions about how to evaluate a good social media KPI? They should be:

• Tied to business goals: It’s no good if the metric you want to measure doesn’t align with your objectives. Awareness, driving sales, and improved customer engagement are all plausible answers.
• Easily measurable: Choose KPIs you can track over time using tools. “Make it go viral” on its own isn’t an aspiration.
• Actionable: A good metric is one you can act on. You should have a clear path to optimize the strategy if engagement drops or referral traffic declines.

NP Digital Social Media Manager, Kayla Bautista, puts it this way:

“At the start of a social media campaign, prioritize metrics based on your campaign goals. If the goal is brand awareness, focus on reach, impressions, and follower growth. For engagement, track likes, comments, shares, and saves to gauge audience interaction. If driving traffic or conversions, prioritize click-through rates, website traffic, and conversion rates from social referrals. Continuously analyze data and refine strategies to maximize impact, ensuring every metric contributes to meaningful results.”

Measure Your Social Media Campaign Success

Most tools work in real-time. If you can plan ahead and set up tracking before the campaign begins (and before the report is due), it’s much easier to access needed data.

Track performance by evaluating how your campaigns or content performs against the KPIs and goals you established. These KPI benchmarks are a guide for future campaigns, and sharing insights is key. Two important questions to ask for every KPI include:

• How do your numbers compare to what you expected?
• How do they compare to your competitors or related products and campaigns?

One big advantage of social media analytics is that gathering comparative data is easy. Running reports on your competitors can give you valuable insights into trends, engagement, and opportunities.

Lastly, don’t neglect a regular reporting schedule. Consistency is key. Regular check-ins on these metrics ensure your hard work isn’t unnoticed and let you make adjustments in real-time.

Adjust Your Social Media Strategy

The final step in your process is to carefully review the social media measurement program:

• How are these metrics doing?
• Are you missing anything?
• Was anything unnecessary or superfluous?

Look at what you can improve. Make changes. Measure more. Check back in with your initial goals and make sure new metrics actually help you address them.

Let’s go back to our Instagram or TikTok campaign with the influencer. Are their posts driving links to your e-commerce platform? Are people re-sharing that content?

If you’re participating in social media, you really need to understand how you’re doing. Ask yourself:

• Is your content having the right impact?
• Are you meeting your company’s goals?

That’s why monitoring and measuring your social media activities is so crucial. You need reliable, consistent analytics that let you track your success on channels as diverse as Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.

FAQs

What are social media metrics?

Social media metrics are like the vital signs for your social media presence. Just like your heart rate or blood pressure can tell a doctor how your body is doing, these metrics tell you how your content is doing out there on social media. This can be anything from how many people are liking and sharing your posts to how many people your content is reaching or even how many people clicked on a link in your post. These numbers give you an idea of what’s working and what you could do better.

How to track social media metrics?

Tracking social media metrics is easier than you might think. Most social media platforms, like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, have their built-in analytics tools. These tools are like a report card for your posts, telling you how many people interacted with them, who those people are, and much more.

If you want a bit more detail or want to track multiple platforms at once, tools like Hootsuite, Buffer, and Google Analytics can help. Remember, the most important thing is to keep an eye on the numbers that matter most to your goals.

How do I analyze social media metrics?

Analyzing social media metrics is like playing detective—you’re looking for clues in your numbers that tell you more about your audience and your content. 

The first thing you need to do is to think about your goals—are you trying to get the word out about your brand? Or maybe drive more traffic to your website? Once you know that, you can look at the metrics that tell you about those things. 

You’ll also want to monitor trends over time. Are your numbers going up? Down? Staying steady? 

And finally, you might want to compare your numbers with similar businesses or industry standards—it’s always good to know how you’re stacking up.

How do I measure social media campaign success?

Measuring the success of a social media campaign is a lot like marking a checklist. You’ve got your goals on one hand—maybe that’s getting more followers, selling more products, or getting more people to sign up for your newsletter. And on the other hand, you’ve got your metrics—those numbers we talked about before. 
If your numbers show that you’re meeting or exceeding your goals, then you’re succeeding.
Remember, though, success doesn’t always happen overnight. Keep tracking, keep adjusting your strategy based on what your numbers tell you, and you’re on the path to a successful campaign.

Conclusion

That’s it. Your primer on social media marketing metrics. Remember: tracking, understanding, and analyzing these KPIs is the way to unlock your social media campaigns’ potential.

These numbers can give huge insights into your audience’s behaviors, preferences, and interactions with your brand. Use them to enhance your strategies to resonate with your target audience.

The world of social media is dynamic and changes constantly. This process isn’t a one-off task but an ongoing commitment. Do it right, and it can lead to major growth and brand visibility.

Be patient. Persevere. Focus on creativity. This can help you set your goals, track metrics, and let the data guide your way to improvement.