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If you’re a marketer, you’ve probably experienced the frustration of pouring resources into social media campaigns, only to struggle with knowing what’s truly driving growth. With endless social media metrics to track and data flowing in from all directions, it can feel like you're chasing shadows and constantly wondering, "What actually works?"
84% of marketers agree that consumers will actively search for brands on social media this year, which means getting your social media strategy right is more important than ever. Yet, the abundance of data can be overwhelming.
The challenge? Not all social media metrics are created equal. Some will give you the insights you need to refine your approach, while others might lead you nowhere, wasting time and energy.
In this post, we’ll dive into 16 essential social media marketing metrics to track, helping you cut through the clutter. We’ll also explore the social media metrics map and show you the best way to report results that truly matter to your clients.
Let’s get started.
What are social media metrics?
Social media metrics are key data points that reveal how well your content is performing on social platforms. They offer real-time insights into what’s working, what needs improvement, and optimization opportunities to increase visibility and ROI.
Most importantly, social media metrics help answer critical questions such as:
- Are your campaigns reaching the right audience?
- Which content types are driving the most engagement?
- How effective are your calls to action?
- Is your budget being tied to your conversion goal?
Whether your goal is to improve brand awareness, drive traffic, or increase conversions, social media metrics bridge the gap between strategy and results. They provide actionable insights on your campaign performance and demonstrate how your social media strategy contributes to accomplishing overall business goals.
Why is measuring social media marketing metrics important?
Measuring social media marketing metrics is essential because it enables you to demonstrate how social media efforts align with broader business goals. By tracking the right metrics, you can optimize campaigns, prove ROI, and adjust strategies in real-time for maximum impact.
According to the 2025 Sprout Social Index, 65% of marketing leaders say they need to prove how social media efforts contribute to achieving measurable outcomes. Tracking the right social media metrics at the right time highlights the value of ROI, ensuring every step of your social media marketing strategy is justified and profitable.
The Social Media Metrics Map
Before you begin tracking, it’s important to map the social media metrics into their respective funnel. This way, you can easily monitor progress through each stage of the customer journey. Mapping these KPIs also informs your overall social strategy, ensuring your efforts are aligned with business objectives.
Here are the four distinct stages of a social media metrics map:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Conversion
- Customer Advocacy
Awareness: This is where your brand starts to show up on your audience’s radar, gaining attention across social platforms. The goal is to maximize visibility and recognition.
Engagement: At this stage, your audience interacts with your content. The primary objective is to increase engagement and build a strong brand connection.
Conversion: Here, the engaged followers take the next step – whether that’s clicking through to your website, signing up, or making a purchase. The emphasis is on ROI related metrics, which clients pay close attention to in your report.
Customer Advocacy: In this final stage, satisfied customers turn into loyal advocates, sharing their positive experiences and promoting your brand organically on social media.
Therefore, mapping social media KPIs to each stage gives you clarity, helping you focus on metrics that align with business goals and drive revenue.
16 Social Media Metrics You Need to Track
Let’s explore the 16 essential social media marketing metrics for each stage of the funnel, along with actionable templates to help you achieve better results.
Social media awareness metrics
1. Reach
Reach refers to the total number of unique users who have seen your social media post. Higher reach indicates that your content is driving more visibility. If the numbers are low, refine copy, creatives, and adjust targeting to high-intent audiences.
Tip: If your content reaches a wider audience (non-followers), it signals that the algorithm values your content.
Use our free LinkedIn Pages report template to track key social media KPIs in one place.
2. Impressions
Impressions measure the total number of times your content is displayed on a user’s screen, regardless of whether it was clicked. You can effectively gauge the top-of-funnel engagement, which is crucial for gaining exposure.
However, when you combine it with the social media engagement metrics, you can understand how well your content resonates with your audience’s preferences.
3. Video views
65% of marketers report Y-O-Y growth in adopting YouTube for video strategy. Currently, video is the most popular content format across all social platforms, signalling stronger connectivity and audience engagement.
That said, video views indicate the number of times a video has been watched on social media. The insights help you strategize your video marketing strategy to broaden exposure and create captivating content that converts.
4. Brand mentions
Brand mentions refer to instances where your brand, company, or product is mentioned or discussed on social media platforms. Monitoring mentions helps you assess organic brand awareness and track customer sentiment.
Positive mentions are a signal of healthy engagement, while negative mentions can provide actionable insights for reputation management and customer feedback.
Social media engagement metrics
5. Audience engagement
Audience engagement rate measures the level of interaction (likes, comments, shares) your content receives relative to your total audience size. A high engagement rate indicates that your content is relevant and sparking conversations, which is key to building lasting relationships with followers.
Monitor page reach, impressions (organic vs paid), audience engagement, and customer sentiment. Use our free Facebook Page Insights report template and visualize actionable performance insights.
6. Share of voice
Share of voice refers to the percentage of conversations about your brand compared to competitors within a given industry or market. It is a key metric that reflects your brand’s visibility and presence within the broader market landscape.
A higher share of voice indicates that your brand is leading or significantly influencing industry discussions, while a lower share suggests that competitors may be capturing more attention.
7. Click-Through Rate
CTR measures the percentage of users who click on a link within your post or ad, typically leading to a landing page or website.
A high CTR indicates that your call-to-action (CTAs) and content are compelling enough to drive traffic. It’s an essential metric for evaluating the effectiveness of your promotional efforts and understanding what captures your audience’s interest.
8. Video competition rate
Video completion rate is the percentage of viewers who watch your video from start to finish. This metric shows how engaging and valuable your video content is to your audience.
A high video completion rate signals that your content is capturing and maintaining viewer interest. Conversely, if users drop off early (e.g., after 10 seconds) despite a high view count, it suggests that while the video initially grabs attention, it fails to sustain it. This helps you refine your video content to better retain viewers and improve overall engagement.
Social media conversion metrics
9. Conversion rate
Conversion rate measures the percentage of users who take a desired action (such as making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter) after interacting with your social media content.
A strong B2B conversion rate for organic social is 1.7% and paid social is 0.9%. A high conversion rate shows that your content and call-to-action (CTAs) are effective, whereas a low conversion rate requires you to revisit your content strategy and remove frictions in the user journey.
10. Referral traffic
Referral traffic tracks the number of visitors coming to your website from social media platforms. While it doesn’t guarantee conversions, it is a great indicator of analyzing how your social media efforts directly contribute to improving ROI.
The best way to measure is through UTM tracking. With UTM tracking, you can add short codes to the URL you promote on social media, so you can see in Google Analytics the amount of traffic being sent from your post or ad.
11. Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who land on your page from a social media post but leave without taking any further action.
A high bounce rate can signal that your landing page content isn’t aligned with your social media ad. Monitoring this metric allows you to assess and improve user experience and content relevance to keep visitors engaged longer.
12. Cost Per Click
CPC measures the cost you pay for each click on your social media ads. It helps you optimize your budget allocation and ensure you’re getting the most value for your advertising spend by lowering costs while maintaining performance.
Blend KPIs from Facebook Ads, Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and more into one view to measure true cross-channel ROI. Try Two Minute Reports free for 14 days and start optimizing smarter.
13. Cost Per Thousand Impressions (CPM)
CPM is the cost of 1,000 impressions of your ad. It helps assess the cost-efficiency of your paid social campaigns. By tracking CPM, you can evaluate the overall reach of your ads and determine if you're getting enough exposure relative to the cost, making it easier to adjust your ad strategy for optimal results.
Social media advocacy metrics
14. Average response time
Average response time measures how quickly your brand replies to customer queries, comments, or messages on social media. A faster response rate can strengthen brand loyalty and encourage advocacy by making customers feel valued.
Consider that your brand's customer service team manages social media inquiries across Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Over the course of one week, the team handles a total of 150 inquiries. The total time spent responding to these inquiries is 300 minutes.
Average response time:
300 minutes ÷ 150 inquiries = 2 minutes per inquiry
In this case, your brand is responding to inquiries within an average of 2 minutes.
15. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
You have responded to your customer inquiries and closed the tickets.
Well, that’s great. But it doesn’t stop here.
You need to understand whether your customers liked your solution. How satisfied are they with your service? Did they like interacting with you?
This is where CSAT comes into play. It shows how satisfied customers are with their interactions or experiences with your brand, often measured through surveys or ratings. High satisfaction levels indicate that your brand is delivering value, increasing the likelihood of positive reviews and referrals.
16. Net Promoter Score
Net Promoter Score tracks how likely your target audiences will recommend your brand to their peer groups. It is measured by a single, core question: “On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend [your brand] to a friend or colleague?”
NPS is a strong indicator of advocacy potential. Tracking it helps you understand how well your social media interactions translate into customer loyalty and word-of-mouth promotion. To improve NPS, provide reliable solutions, respond to inquiries quickly, and share useful content that adds value to your audience.
Selecting the right social media marketing metrics
Your goal isn’t to track everything – it’s to track what truly matters. The key is to focus on the right metrics that are aligned with your client’s goals and direct your efforts towards actionable data-driven reporting. Here’s how you can:
- Focus on metrics that support your objectives – use reach for brand awareness and conversion rate for driving sales or leads.
- Track metrics that help you take action. If CTR is low, optimize your ad copy or targeting to improve conversions.
- Choose metrics that match the audience’s stage in the funnel. Leverage this data to identify which content helps in discovery, boosts engagement and where audiences drop off.
- Evaluate how different platforms serve different goals. For instance, Facebook drives traffic, while Instagram fuels engagement. Track both to get a clear, consolidated picture of where to align your efforts.
Overall, focus on the metrics that allow you to adjust your approach and optimize campaigns, ensuring you're always driving measurable growth for your clients.
How to track social media metrics with Two Minute Reports?
Selecting the right social media metrics is only half the battle. The real work lies in consistent tracking to uncover major wins, losses, and optimization opportunities. While you juggle spreadsheets and manually update key metrics, your client's social media ROI could be slipping through the cracks.
Though native analytics tools offer robust data, they often lack the flexibility to track custom KPIs for multiple clients.
This is where a reliable social media reporting software becomes indispensable. By consolidating key metrics into one cohesive dashboard, you can deliver actionable insights and provide a streamlined reporting experience, ultimately enhancing the value you provide and maximizing your client’s bottom line.
Here’s how you can track actionable social media metrics with Two Minute Reports:
- Integrate social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc, into Google Sheets or Looker Studio.
- Select from ready-made social media reporting templates to tailor your marketing reports according to your client’s requirements.
- Customize your social media dashboards to reflect client-specific KPIs such as impressions, CTR, conversions, ROAS, etc.
- Share your branded social media reports via email, PDF across multiple clients seamlessly.
- Keep your reports up-to-date without manual intervention, ensuring accurate and timely insights.
Focus on the right social media metrics for growth
The key to scaling your social media strategy isn’t tracking every possible metric – it’s choosing the ones that drive tangible outcomes. With the right metrics, you can shift from just measuring activity to actively influencing growth.
Here are the key takeaways:
- Consistently analyze and measure social media performance before implementing key strategic decisions.
- Leverage a social media analytics tool to streamline data collection and focus on the metrics that truly matter.
- Test, tweak, and refine based on what the metrics reveal to continuously drive better results.
Eventually, when your data drives decisions, you’re no longer reacting – you’re optimizing, scaling, and proving value to your clients.
Meet the Author
Shalini Murugan
Shalini is driven by ideas that create a tangible impact. At Two Minute Reports, she specializes in content that helps marketers optimize their reporting workflows. When she's not transforming complex data into meaningful insights, you might find her lost in a book, jotting down ideas in her notebook, or connecting the dots others overlook.
Frequently Asked Questions
To drive sustainable growth, focus on metrics that align with your strategic objectives - whether it's enhancing brand awareness, boosting engagement, or driving conversions. This alignment empowers you to optimize your approach and maximize ROI effectively.
Yes, Two Minute Reports enables you to create personalized dashboards that align with your client’s unique KPIs. By installing the Two Minute Reports add-on from the Google Workspace Marketplace, you can connect your social media accounts, extract goal-specific metrics, and automate real-time updates. This streamlined approach helps you stay on top of performance and continuously optimize ROI with minimal effort.
Tracking metrics on a weekly or bi-weekly basis gives you enough data to make informed decisions and quickly optimize campaigns. Real-time monitoring ensures you're always on top of what's working and where adjustments are needed.
Yes. Two Minute Reports offers fully customizable social media reporting templates for Google Sheets and Looker Studio. You can add custom logos, layouts, interactive visuals and filters to deliver branded, professional reports that demonstrate your agency’s analytical efforts.
By automating social media reporting and providing real-time insights, Two Minute Reports enables you to identify what's working and adjust your campaigns accordingly – saving time and optimizing your budget for better ROI.
Yes, Two Minute Reports integrates with major social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. You can automatically track KPIs in real time, giving you a centralized view of your social media performance. This eliminates the need for manual data collection and allows you to focus on optimizing strategies for better engagement and conversions.
