Which Social Media Metrics Are Marketers Tracking? [New Research]

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Social media metrics are imperative to social strategy. They give you an inside look at your channels’ performance and how your target audience perceives you. They can also provide you with ways to improve upon your strategy.

But what metrics should marketers track to ensure success or boost their strategy? To keep you from getting bogged down by all the numbers, we’ve made a list of the essential social media metrics to track.

These metrics will give you insight into customers, how to track ROI, improve your brand presence online, and walk away with happier customers.

Marketers can set their brand’s strategy up for growth and improvement by tracking and measuring social media metrics.

How to Measure Social Media Marketing Performance

There are several ways marketers can measure the performance of their social media marketing strategy. The most common methods are analyzing web traffic, impressions, engagement, and lead generation.

Let’s explore these different aspects of performance and more metrics marketers should track to ensure the success of their social media marketing efforts.

1. Web Traffic

Increasing traffic to your website should be a top priority depending on the nature of your business and the social media platforms your company focuses on. 27% of marketers surveyed by the HubSpot Blog listed traffic to their website as a high-priority metric for measuring the success of organic social media campaigns.

30% said the same for paid social media campaigns. If your company relies on web traffic as part of its business strategy, you’ll want to measure how many of your page views come directly from social media.

Key platforms for this focus include Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. You can use a web traffic tool such as Google Analytics to measure how much your traffic comes from organic social media.

2. Social Media Impressions

Social media impressions measure how many users were exposed to your content, and it’s a metric worth tracking.

Understanding your social media impressions is important because this data can provide valuable insight into how far your ad spend can go and can help inform future paid ad spending so you can maximize your budget.

However, even if paid ads aren’t a part of your strategy, you may still want to look into how many impressions your social media content is gathering over time. This data can tell you how different types of content resonate with your audience across platforms.

It’s also worth noting that each social media platform measures impressions differently. For example, on Twitter, each user that sees a tweet is considered an impression.

On Facebook, each time a paid ad is seen on screen, it is considered an impression. Instagram counts an impression each time a user views a piece of content (such as a static post, story, or Reel)).

On TikTok, no “impressions” measurement is in the app’s analytics section; however, you could consider each video view an impression for your own data.