Learn which key social media metrics in 2023 you should track and analyze to improve your social media marketing efforts. You might be on every single meaningful social media site out there but all your effort isn’t really worth anything unless you’re tracking what’s driving your results and what’s not. Trust me, there have been plenty of times I post something out there and I thought that was great.
Well, I gained no traction. Sure, I may have gotten some likes or impressions but those things really didn’t help my business grow. So, what do I do after a post like that? I go to the numbers.
10 most important social media metrics to track in 2023
- Reach
- Impressions
- Engagement Rate.
- Amplification Rate
- Audience Growth Rate
- Social Referrals
- Video views
- Video completion rate
- Click-through rate (CTR)
- Conversion rate
- Cost-per-click (CPC)
1. Reach
Reach is the number of people who see your content. It’s always important to ask yourself two main questions with this one, whether or not you’re reaching enough people. If you’re reaching enough people why aren’t they converting? Pay attention to an important subset of your reach. If you’re targeting the wrong type of people you may want to adjust your content, look to see what some of your competitors do so that way you can target the right people and generate more sales.
2. Impressions
Meta saw impressions grow 10% in 2021. But when you think about this, if these social networks are seeing their percentages grow, your percentages should also grow. But on the flip side, if their percentages are decreasing and yours are decreasing, you’re like, wait, I’m not getting as many impressions. What am I doing wrong? Well, let’s say a social platform’s, you know, impressions decrease by 20%, but your impressions maintain flat. That means you’re doing something right. If they’re actually gaining users, you would be doing better, but that’s why tracking impressions is super important.
3. Engagement Rate.
The easiest way to figure out how you’re doing on all the social networks is go look at your competition, see their engagement rate with how many likes and comments they’re getting per post based on how many followers they have. If you’re doing better than your competition, you’re doing good.
4. Amplification Rate
The ratio of shares per post to the overall number of followers. So, you want to really look at this because you can see what kind of content is helping you and which content isn’t really getting you the amplification that you’re looking for. You want to create more of the content that is getting you the amplification and less of the content that isn’t getting you much of it.
Metric five, virality rate. Similar to amplification in that it measures how much your content is shared, but virality rate calculates share as a percentage of the impressions rather than as an impression of followers.
5. Audience Growth Rate
How many new followers are you getting on social media over a certain period of time as a percentage of your total audience? Here’s a tip for you. If you want to grow your audience fast, get on TikTok. It’s the fastest growing social network with 105% user growth in the US over the last couple years.
6. Social Referrals
According to HubSpot, consumers are 71% more likely to make a purchase based on social referrals. Now, social referrals are huge because it’s other people vouching for you saying your product or your service is good. Think of it as a version of review or a rating on Amazon. That’s the same concept with let’s say, social referrals.
7. Video views
If you’re creating videos (you’re creating videos, right?), you want to know how many people are watching them. Each social network determines what counts as a “view” a little differently, but usually, even a few seconds of watch time counts as a “view.”
So, video views is a good at-a-glance indicator of how many people have seen at least the start of your video, but it’s not as important as…
8. Video completion rate
How often do people actually watch your videos all the way through to the end? This is a good indicator that you’re creating quality content that connects with your audience.
Video completion rate is a key signal to many social media algorithms, so this is a good one to focus on improving!
9. Click-through rate (CTR)
Click-through rate, or CTR, is how often people click a link in your post to access additional content. That could be anything from a blog post to your online store.
CTR gives you a sense of how many people saw your social content and wanted to know more. It’s a good indicator of how well your social content promotes your offering.
To calculate CTR, divide the total number of clicks for a post by the total number of impressions. Multiply by 100 to get your CTR as a percentage.
10. Conversion rate
Conversion rate measures how often your social content starts the process to a conversion event like a subscription, download, or sale. This is one of the most important social media marketing metrics because it shows the value of your social content as a means of feeding your funnel.
UTM parameters are the key to making your social conversions trackable. Learn all about how they work in our blog post on using UTM parameters to track social success.
Once you’ve added your UTMs, calculate the conversion rate by dividing the number of conversions by the number of clicks.
11. Cost-per-click (CPC)
Cost-per-click, or CPC, is the amount you pay per individual click on a social ad.
Knowing the lifetime value of a customer for your business, or even the average order value, will help you put this number in important context.
A higher lifetime value of a customer combined with a high conversion rate means you can afford to spend more per click to get visitors to your website in the first place.
You don’t need to calculate CPC: You can find it in the analytics for the social network where you’re running your ad.
Now, a bonus metric for you and this is the most important one which is why I really want to save it for last and this would technically be number eight, is ROI. What is your ROI on social media? What posts are getting you the most return versus which posts are generating very little to nothing? And you can track this in Google Analytics. You can set up goal and conversion tracking. Also, when someone completes a lead form or a purchase or buys a service from your signs up you can also survey them and ask them how they find you and where they signed up from.