The Social Media Metrics You Need To Be Looking At

There are many different metrics that businesses can track on social media to measure their performance and evaluate their success. The art of effective social media measurement is understanding which metrics matter most to your business, based on your goals.

Below we look at some of the most important social media metrics you should be tracking in 2023.

Awareness metrics

  1. Reach: This is simply the number of people who see your content. It’s a good idea to monitor your average reach, as well as the reach of each individual post, story, or video.

    A valuable subset of this metric to keep an eye on is what percentage of your reach is made up of followers vs. non-followers. If a lot of non-followers are seeing your content, that means it’s being shared or doing well.

  2. Impressions: Impressions indicates the number of times people saw your content. It can be higher than reach because the same person might look at your content more than once.

    A high level of impressions compared to reach means people are looking at a post multiple times. Do some digging to see if you can understand why it standing out.

  3. Growth Rate: Audience growth rate measures how many new followers your business gets on social media within a certain amount of time.

    It’s not a simple count of your new followers. Instead, it measures your new followers as a percentage of your total audience. The bigger your following grows, the harder it is to maintain momentum.

ENangement metrics

4. Engagement Rate: This measures the reactions, comments and shares your content gets as a percentage of your audience.

How you define “audience” may vary. You might want to calculate engagement relative to your number of followers. But remember that not all your followers will see each post. Plus, you might get engagement from people who don’t (yet) follow you.

These are current engagement rate benchmarks:
- Facebook: 0.06%
- Instagram: 0.68%
- LinkedIn: 3.16%
- TIkTok: 4.1%

5. Amplification Rate: This is the ratio of shares per post to the number of overall followers. Coined by Avinash Kaushik, author and digital marketing evangelist at Google, amplification is “the rate at which your followers take your content and share it through their networks.” Basically, the higher your amplification rate, the more your followers are expanding your reach for you.

Video metrics

6. Video Views: This is the total number of people who have viewed your video. It’s important to keep in mind that these are measured differently across different platforms.

  • YouTube: Someone intentionally watches your video for 30 seconds

  • Facebook: Someone views your video for 3 seconds

  • Instagram: Video views count after 3 seconds; Live video views count the second someone joins the broadcast

  • TikTok: A video view counts as soon as your video starts playing in someone’s feed

  • Twitter: Someone watches your video for 2 seconds with at least 50% of the video player on their screen

  • LinkedIn: They have the same policy as Twitter: 2 seconds with at least half the video in view

7. Video Completion Rates: This is how often people actually watch your video until the end, which is an important metric it is a key signal to many social media algorithms, so it is a good one to focus on improving!

ROI Metrics

8. Click-Through Rate (CTR): This is how often people click a link in your post to access additional content. That could be anything from your products in your online store, a downloadable asset, or a blog post.

CTR benchmarks for paid social ads hover around 1.1%

9. Conversion Rate: This is a measure of how often your social content starts the process to a conversion event like a subscription, download, or sale. This is a vital social media marketing metric because it shows the value of your social content as a means of feeding your funnel.

Industry Specific Conversion Rate Benchmarks:
Grocery: 6.8%

  • Pharmaceuticals: 6.8%

  • Health & beauty: 3.9%

  • Travel & hospitality: 3.9%

  • Home goods & furnishings: 2.8%

  • Consumer electronics: 1.4%

  • Luxury: 1.1%

  • Automotive: 0.7%

  • B2B: 0.6%

  • Telecoms: 0.5%

  • Media: 0.4%

  • Financial services: 0.2%

  • Energy: 0.1%


10. Cost Per Click (CPC): This is the amount you pay per individual click on a social ad.

The Current CPC Benchmark is $0.62

Ready to start measuring your social media campaigns now that you know the right KPIs to look for? If you’re interested in learning even more about measuring your social media performance, reach out to us for a chat!

Mina Imsi