The undisputed leader in social media management
For over a decade, the world’s largest enterprises have trusted Sprinklr Social for its in-depth listening, unmatched channel coverage, enterprise-grade configurability and industry-defining AI.
Social Media Metrics: All Types Explained [2024]
Well, well, well… Hello fellow marketers!
Looks like you’ve stumbled upon this little corner of the internet because you’re curious about social media metrics, huh?
Perfect timing – you're exactly where you need to be😊
In this article, we’re going to simplify social media metrics for you, making it extremely easy to monitor your social media performance and achieve success. But a word of caution here: Jay Baer, in his article, warns that most metrics go flatline because they don’t really connect and align to what matters in business. So, let’s not just blindly run only after those misleading vanity metrics, okay? Instead, we'll zero in on the metrics that sculpt our socialverse in this AI era.
Ready to get into it? Let’s begin with the basics!
What are social media metrics?
In the simplest terms, social media metrics can be referred to as the pulse of your brand’s online existence. Think of them as the numbers (which we’ll get to later on) and percentages showing how well (or not so well) your social media activities are doing. They help you track everything from social media engagement on your posts to brand mentions, tagged or not!
Essentially, these metrics tune into EVERYTHING that could affect your brand’s online reputation, and answers questions like:
💬 How users engage with your content
🎯 How well your content achieves the intended outcome
📢 How quick and effective is your social media customer support
💰 How much revenue you earned from social media efforts and activities
🌟 Are you hitting your social media goals, be it follower growth, engagement or leads
That’s quite a lot! Let’s unpack these metrics, one by one😊
Tip: We suggest setting up a 30-day free trial of Sprinklr Social so you can see all these metrics on a single dashboard and get started right away!
Category 1: Social media marketing metrics
1. Impressions
Impressions is all about how many times your social media posts pop up in someone's feed, even if they don’t actually click or engage with them.
Well, think of it as your content’s chance to make an appearance at the party — which means it’s showing up, but not everyone's going to say hi 😉
Let’s build more clarity with a relatable instance.
Imagine you’ve got a promotion running on Facebook and your post brings up 5,000 impressions. That means it’s shown up 5,000 times in your audiences’ feeds.
However, having a lot of impressions doesn't necessarily mean your content is effective. It just shows that your post is being displayed on social media feed. That’s all.
To really quantify your social media marketing effectiveness, you need to look at other metrics like engagement and click-through rates, which indicate how many people are interacting with your content or taking action after seeing your post.
As for calculating impressions, well, there’s no backstage math for you to do😊 So stay calm!
🔕 Don’t get anxious!
While there isn't a direct "formula" to calculate impressions like there is for conversion rate or click-through rate because impressions are totally based on the platform's internal data and algorithms, you can still measure impressions as:
Impressions of a social media post = Total number of times the post is displayed
For example, if a social media platform like Instagram shows your post to 100 different users and some of them see it more than once, the total impressions could be higher than 100, depending on how many times it was displayed in total. Likewise, if a user reshares your post, its impressions will multiply since it is now visible to that user’s community as well.
2. Click-through rate (CTR)
Click-through rate or CTR indicates how frequently social media users click on a link embedded in one of your social media posts to access additional information about your brand or product. Higher CTR rates indicate your post is sparking interest and getting people to take the next step.
Here’s a key point to keep in mind while thinking about CTRs:
CTR benchmarks differ widely by factors such as content type, platform algorithm and post placement, to name a few. Generally, CTRs above 5% are often considered quite good for social media ads, while CTRs below 1% might be seen as low.
Now, there’s also a formula to give you the exact click-through rate. Let’s break it down for you:
💡Example: Let’s say your post generated 100 clicks and was seen by 2,000 people during its campaign.
Your CTR = 100 (clicks) / 2,000 (impressions) = 0.05 x 100 (percentage) = 5%
3. Share of Voice (SOV)
Share of Voice (SoV) is both a social media and marketing metric that measures the percentage of the market your brand owns as compared to your competitors. The term "own" here varies in interpretation: some brands and marketing experts view SoV as the amount a company spends on advertising relative to its competitors, while others consider it more broadly, including organic keyword traffic, social media shares and more.
Since we're talking only about social media metrics in this blog, let's zoom in on SoV in terms of social shares. Refer the image below. These social shares can be posts and other forms of content distribution by people that mention your brand, directly or indirectly.
Now, people might talk about your brand in two ways:
- Directly: where they tag your brand, like “@YourBrandName”
- Indirectly: where they mention your brand without tagging and just saying “YourBrandName”
These brand mentions (direct or indirect) contribute to the overall SoV by showing how much of the social media conversation revolves around your brand compared to your competitors.
Here’s the simplest formula to measure Share of Voice (SoV):
Here’s the breakdown:
- Your brand's mentions: Count how many times people talk about your brand on social media.
- Total industry mentions: This is the sum of your brand's mentions and your competitors' mentions combined.
💡 Example: If you have 200 mentions and the total mentions in your industry are 1000, your SoV is = (200/1000) × 100 = 20%
📌 Don't let your brand get lost in the social media shuffle!
Keep up with the social media buzz using social media monitoring tools like Sprinklr, which tracks your brand’s presence, with or without tags. Here’s how they do it:
- Track mentions and keywords: They scan for specific keywords and phrases related to your brand, competitors and industry on various platforms, gathering data on the frequency and context of mentions.
- Sentiment analysis: Using natural language processing, they gauge the mood (positive, negative or neutral) of mentions, offering insights into public opinion and trending topics.
- Real-time alerts: They provide instant notifications and real-time alerts for brand mentions or activity spikes related to your specified keywords, allowing for timely responses and engagement.
4. Cost per thousand impressions (CPM)
Cost per thousand impressions or CPM focuses solely on the number of views your ad receives, not the actions taken after seeing it. Essentially, CPM calculates how much you’re paying just to get your ad displayed, yielding insight into the visibility of your campaign.
Example: If your CPM is $5, it means you’re paying 5 bucks every time your ad gets 1,000 views on social media. So, if your ad is seen 10,000 times, it would cost you $50.
Make your brand a lead magnet: 10 Social Media Lead Generation Tactics With Examples
Category 2: Social media engagement metrics
1. Engagement rate
Engagement rate covers and measures the number of engagements (reactions, likes, shares and comments) your social media posts gets from your audience.
Here's a heads-up, though: not all your followers/audience will see every social media post. And sometimes, the engagement buzz comes from people who don’t even follow you yet! Intriguing right?
For a clearer understanding, consider this example: If your post is shared by a follower and their friend, who doesn’t follow you, but comments on it, then that comment gets counted as engagement. And, when we talk about calculating engagement rate, there’s more than one way to slice it.
The basic one goes like this:
To calculate the engagement rate of your social media content, you can use this simple formula:
Here's what it means in plain language:
- Total engagement: This is the sum of all interactions with your content, like likes, comments, shares and clicks.
- Total followers: The number of people who follow your account.
Example, if your post got 100 interactions (likes, comments, etc.) and you have 1,000 followers:
Your Engagement Rate = (100 / 1,000) × 100 = 10%
This means 10% of your followers interacted with your post, which now becomes your engagement rate
If you still need to dive deeper, read our blog on Social Media Engagement: What You Need to Know!
2. Reach
Reach measures the number of unique users who have seen a particular post, ad or campaign in a specified time period on a platform. Tracking and monitoring reach gives you an indicator of your content’s visibility.
Here’s why:
It clues you in on the spread of your message, showing you how far and wide your content travels in the digital world. A higher reach means wide visibility of your content with a potential to become wider.
While there's no formula to calculate reach as you would with engagement or click-through rates, you can still analyze it by looking at the insights provided by your social media platform. Platforms define reach differently and its computation depends on the platform’s content distribution methods.
Other interesting facts about reach:
- Organic and paid reach: Organic reach means your content is seen naturally by users in their feeds. Paid reach means your content is boosted by ads.
- Reach vs. Impressions: Reach is often compared with impressions, which represent the total number of times a piece of content is displayed, including multiple views by the same user. Reach provides a more accurate measure of unique audience size.
- Audience segmentation: Reach metrics can be segmented by various factors such as demographics, location, interests, and behavior to provide insights into the composition of the audience reached.
3. Virality rate
Virality rate is typically calculated as the ratio of shares or engagements to the total number of views or impressions expressed as a percentage. A higher virality rate signifies that a piece of content has achieved significant traction and amplification within the social media ecosystem.
In the world of social media, is like that piece of juicy corporate gossip that just can’t stay put and spreads like crazy! 🤭
If you’re itching to quantify virality, here’s a formula for you:
This gives you a neat percentage showing the shareability of your content. For instance, if your video snagged 1,000 views and got shared 100 times:
Virality rate = (100 shares / 1,000 views) × 100 = 10%
A 10% virality rate means that for every ten people who viewed your content, one person shared it on their social media profile. The higher this number, the more viral your content is, giving you a solid read on how much your audience is loving and sharing your work.
Let’s break it down with a relatable example.
Imagine you drop a hilarious dog video and it’s not just your aunt who's cracking up over it — her entire kitty club, their friends and then some are sharing it like there’s no tomorrow. If it kicks off with 50 shares in the first hour, then jumps to 100 or 200 in the next and keeps skyrocketing, congrats, you’re officially in a viral territory 😊
🧭 Craving Viral Success? Check Out "Tips for Participating in Viral Social Media Challenges"
Category 3: Social media conversion metrics
Social media conversion metrics measure how often people take a desired action, like buying a product or signing up for a newsletter, after interacting with your social media content. In simple terms, these metrics tell you who's just browsing and who's actually buying. To measure conversions, here are the key metrics to measure:
1. Conversion rate
Conversion rate is the percentage of users who complete a desired action, such as making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter or downloading a resource, after interacting with a social media post or ad. It’s all about figuring out how many people go from just looking at your social media posts to actually doing something. It’s a big deal because it shows if your content and efforts are translating into real business outcomes.
Do check out this easy-peasy formula if you want to calculate the conversion rate:
💡 Pro tip: UTM parameters are your secret weapon for tracking social media conversions. These parameters allow you to tag your social media links with specific campaign names, mediums and sources. This means you can see exactly which campaigns are driving traffic and conversions, helping you pinpoint what's working best for your social media strategy.
2. Cost per conversion
Cost per conversion is a metric that tells you how much it costs to acquire a customer or achieve a specific action (like a sale, sign-up or download) through your advertising efforts. It represents the average cost paid by the advertiser for each successful conversion generated by the campaign.
A simple math to calculate cost per conversion:
For example, if you spend $500 on a marketing campaign and it results in 50 people signing up for your service, your cost per conversion would be: $10.
CPC helps advertisers and marketers to:
- Optimize their campaigns by adjusting bids
- Allocate budgets effectively
- Maximize social media ROI
- Compare the cost-effectiveness of advertising on different channels
3. Lead form or landing page fills
This metric is used to track the number of users who complete and submit a form on your landing page linked from your social media post or ad. Just look at how many people filled out the form versus how many clicked on your social media post link.
Lead form or landing page fills can be associated with another social media metric called lead generation rate. This metric shows how many of your visitors are turning into leads.
For example, if your campaign attracts 1,000 visitors and from these, you generate 50 leads, your lead generation rate would be: 5%
This means that 5% of the people who visited your site from the campaign took some action that qualifies them as a lead, like filling out a contact form, signing up for a newsletter or downloading a whitepaper.
Category 4: Social media customer service metrics
1. Average response time
Response time is a parameter that measures how long it takes for your support team to respond to customer queries or complaints that come through social media channels. It's akin to how long a customer waits on hold during a phone call but in the social media context.
For example, if a customer messages your brand on X asking about a product feature and your team replies in 30 minutes, your response time for that query is 30 minutes.
Implementing AI customer service bots, like those in platforms such as Sprinklr, can drastically cut down response time, making your social customer service quicker and more efficient.
Here's the formula to calculate average response time:
So, if your team took 150 minutes in total to respond to 10 customer queries, your average response time would be:
Average response time = 150 minutes / 10 = 15 minutes
This means, on average, it took your team 15 minutes to respond to each customer query on social media.
2. Customer satisfaction (CSAT) score
CSAT (customer satisfaction score) is a metric that monitors how happy people are with your product or service. That’s why, after a service interaction, you must have noticed many brands ask you to rate your experience. To find out your CSAT score, yourself, just send a one-question survey asking how satisfied they were. Use the same social media channel where you provided the service and ask them to rate their customer experience.
To find your CSAT score as a percentage, here’s the formula you can use:
- Sum of all satisfaction scores: Add up the ratings given by all respondents on your CSAT survey. These ratings are usually on a scale, such as 1 to 5 or 1 to 10.
- Total number of respondents: Count how many people gave you feedback.
For example, if 10 customers rated their satisfaction level and their scores add up to 40 (on a scale of 1 to 5), your CSAT score would be calculated as:
CSAT Score = (40 / 10) × 100 = 400 / 10 = 40%
Good to know: Avant-garde customer satisfaction software with AI-powered CSAT Prediction and automated CSAT surveys delivers the data-driven insights you need to create better service experiences on all customer and social media channels. Try it out for free?
Category 5: Social media ROI metrics
This might be a little confusing than the rest, so let’s define it. Social media ROI (Return on Investment) metrics help you understand the effectiveness of your social media campaigns in terms of financial gains. These metrics are crucial for determining whether the resources and time you invest in social media are paying off.
Let's take a quick look at some key social media ROI metrics:
Cost per click (CPC)
CPC or Cost per click, in social media is the amount you pay for each click on your paid ads. It’s a way to measure the cost of your advertising campaigns on platforms like Facebook, X, Instagram and LinkedIn.
So how do you exactly calculate the CPC for an ad campaign?
To calculate the CPC, you would divide the total amount spent by the number of clicks:
CPC = Number of clicks on an ad / Total ad spend =200$/100 =$0.50
Imagine you run an ad campaign on Facebook to promote your new salon. You spend $100 on the campaign and it results in 200 people clicking on your ad and visiting your website.
In this example, the Cost Per Click (CPC) for your ad campaign is $0.50. This means, on average, you paid 50 cents for each click on your ad.
3. Return on ad spend (ROAS)
ROAS measures the revenue generated for every dollar spent on advertising. Let’s say you put $100 into promoting your pastry shop on social media and because of that ad, you sell $300 worth of pastries. Your ROAS would be 3:1, which means for every dollar you spent on the ad, you got three dollars back in sales kitty. It’s like investing a dollar and getting three back, making it a sweet deal! Sounds good?
Now, let’s move on the formula of calculating ROAS now:
Category 6: Other Social media metrics
1. Social media influencer impact
Social media influencer impact measures the effectiveness of influencers in promoting your brand and driving engagement or conversions. It’s about understanding how much influence these individuals have on their audience and how this influence translates to actions benefiting your brand, such as increased followers, higher engagement rates or more leads.
To measure the impact of a social media influencer, you can use the following formula:
For example, if an influencer’s campaign generates 500 conversions and the total conversions in the same period are 2,000, the influencer impact would be: 25%. This means that 25% of your total conversions were directly achieved by the influencer’s campaign.
2. Social media sentiment analysis
This one looks at the overall sentiment or tone of online conversations regarding your brand, product, or topic. It involves analyzing text data in the form of messages or comments to determine if the sentiment expressed is positive, negative, or neutral.
The formula for sentiment analysis metrics depends on the tool or software used. Generally, sentiment analysis algorithms assign scores to text based on keywords, tone and context to decode the sentiment. In short, rather than keeping track of mentions or comments, sentiment analysis considers the feelings and opinions of your audience behind their mentions 😊
The algorithm of social listening tools categorizes sentiment within your mentions in the following way:
Look no further, the only guide you need! Social Media Sentiment Analysis: An Easy Guide
Final Thoughts
Wondering how to track down success for your social media?
Phew!! That must have felt like running a social media marathon, didn’t it? But now you're locked and loaded with the know-how to ace your social media game, be ready to face any kind of social media storm! With a solid grasp of social media metrics and social media analytics and reporting tools, you'll have a clear idea of what’s clicking and what’s missing in your social media strategy.
And if the thought of tracking and juggling all these metrics feels overwhelming, don’t worry. Remember how they say, "many hands make light work"? We live by that.
If you're searching for someone to take on the load for you, we're here!
How about giving a free trial of our social media tool a go? You’ll learn how these social media metrics can not only meet but elevate your social media efforts within no time! Let’s make it happen, together!
