Social media measurement: 15 key insights and how to get them

Social media measurement is all about using data to make informed decisions that support and align with business goals. In this post, we’ll explore how social measurement can drive real results for your business.

What is social media measurement?

Social media measurement involves using social metrics and analytics tools to track the success of your brand on social channels. Regular measurement and analysis allow you to understand your audience and improve your results over time.

Taking things a step further, social media measurement also reveals how your social media strategy contributes to the overall value of your brand. You can gain valuable insights into your own brand, your competitors, and your audience.

What can social media measurement tell you about your brand?

Audience insights

Social media measurement reveals a lot about your audience. On the surface level, it’s useful for understanding the basic demographics of the people who are most interested in your brand.

Social media analytics tools provide basic information about your audience, like:

• age,
• gender,
• location,
• language,
• and so on.

All of this can help guide your content strategy, brand voice, and even your product development process.

On a deeper level, social media measurement helps you understand what your audience likes, what they don’t like, and what they need and expect from your brand. You can also gain insights into their behaviors, so you understand when they’re most likely to be online and engage with your social media content.

Target market preferences and pain points

Let’s just make a quick distinction here. Your social media audience is everyone who follows or engages with your brand on social media. Your target market is a more specific set of people. It’s the people who are most likely to actually buy your product and services.

Social media measurement helps you understand who these people are, as well as what kinds of problems your brand can help them solve.

Competitive insights

Social media measurement helps you identify your top competitors and understand how they’re using social media to connect with your shared audience.

This allows you to benchmark your own performance against relevant accounts, spot new competitive threats as they emerge, and identify gaps in your own social strategy.

For example, you can take a look at how often your competitors post, what types of content they post, and how those factors impact their engagement rates. You can also see what kinds of topics they cover to get a sense of the overall conversation in your industry.

Finally, you can measure how much of the social conversation involves your competitors: how much people are talking about them, as well as how involved they are in niche communities important to your brand.

Content performance

Social media measurement allows you to understand the performance of your social content at both the micro and macro levels.

On the macro level, you can see how things are going overall. What are the trends in your engagement, follower growth, reach, and so on. This big-picture measurement helps you understand whether your social strategy, in general, is on the right track. These results also help you measure the ROI of your social media efforts as a whole.

On the macro level, you can measure the performance of individual social media posts and marketing campaigns. Here, you’re looking for more detailed insights. What specific types of content perform best (photo, video, text, etc.)? What caption length and style see the most engagement? What calls to action drive the most clicks? Again, you can measure ROI, but here you’ll measure the return of specific social media campaigns.

Brand awareness, perception, and reputation

Social media measurement provides a wealth of information about how people view your brand.

This includes quantitative data like what percentage of the online conversation is about you. But it also includes qualitative data like how people feel about your brand and what your online reputation is like.

Most importantly, an online measurement program helps you identify when brand reputation or perception shifts rapidly, so you can lean into your wins and nip impending crises in the bud.

What should you measure as a social media marketer?

There’s a lot of data available in most social media analytics programs. Realistically, you can’t possibly track every single metric all the time.

When choosing what social media metrics to focus on, it’s important to understand which ones matter the most to your brand. Think about why you’re tracking each metric. Does it contribute valuable insight that can actually guide your strategic planning, or is it simply a nice to have?

Here are some key areas to focus on when planning how to measure the success of your social media activities.

Engagement

Engagement metrics measure how much people interact with your social content. Engagement is an important measure of how well your content connects with your target audience. High engagement also gives you credibility with new visitors and sends powerful signals of content quality to the algorithms.

Top engagement metrics to track are:

1. Total engagements: The total number of likes, comments, shares, and saves, either for a specific post or for a certain time period
2. Engagement rate: Total likes, comments, shares, and saves divided by number of followers x 100 to get a percentage

Note: That’s the most common way to calculate engagement rate. But how to measure social media engagement rates is actually a whole topic unto itself, as there are many formulas you could use depending on your exact needs. We’ve got a whole blog post on calculating engagement rate to help you out!

For a more nuanced view, think about engagement quality rather than just a simple tally of interactions. For instance, comments signal more interest than likes, and saves signal even more interest. They indicate that your content is worth coming back to.

Not sure what engagement rate to aim for? Here are the overall engagement rates for the last two quarters based on Hootsuite’s own data:

Note though that engagement rates vary a lot by industry. The best social media measurement tools include benchmarking features that allow you to compare yourself to your peers. (More on those tools below.)

Reach

Reach metrics give you a sense of how large your social audience is. They’re also a good indication of brand awareness on social media platforms.

Important social media reach metrics include:

1. Reach: The number of people who see your content
2. Impressions: The number of times people saw your content. This can be higher than reach if people look at your content more than once.
3. Social share of voice (SSoV): How much of the social conversation in your industry is about you. This is a tricky one to calculate manually, so look for a measurement tool that calculates it for you.

To get more nuanced here, look at how much of your reach comes from followers compared to non-followers. A high percentage of non-followers indicates that your content is being shared or getting a bump from the algorithm. These are both signs of quality content, so keep it up!

Video performance

Video content has an additional set of metrics beyond engagement and reach that can reveal how well your content resonates with your audience.

The most important video metrics to track are:

1. Video views: On Facebook and Instagram, 3 seconds counts as a view. On TikTok it’s as soon as a video starts playing. On LinkedIn, views count when there is 2 or more continuous seconds of playback while the video is at least 50% on screen
2. Video completion rate: The number of people who watch your video to the end divided by the number of impressions x 100 for a percentage
3. Watch time: The total amount of time people spent watching your videos over a certain period

For a deeper understanding of how well videos are performing on your social media channels, compare them to other content types and analyze which performs best based on your desired goals.

For example, Hootsuite’s latest data shows that videos (Reels) have lower engagement than either photos or carousels on Instagram. If engagement is your top priority, it could be beneficial to test non-video content types.

Conversion

Conversion metrics indicate how your social content is contributing to your brand’s real business goals. These are the key metrics that help social marketers earn a seat at the strategic planning table.

Key social media metrics to track for conversion are:

1. Conversion rate: The number of people that performed a desired action (purchase, sign-up, etc.) divided by the number of clicks on your social links
2. Click-through rate (CTR): The total number of clicks divided by the number of impressions x 100 to get a percentage
3. Social media ROI: (The value generated from social media – the costs of social media investment) divided by those costs. Multiply by 100 to get a percentage. Or go the easy route and use our free ROI calculator.

If you connect with your audience through multiple touchpoints (say, email and podcast ads in addition to social media), consider using attribution models to determine how much influence social media had in the conversion path. We get into this in our post on social media performance.

Audience metrics

These metrics help you understand how large your audience is, who they are, and how they feel about you. They also help you understand how your audience is changing over time.

The most important audience metrics to track are:

1. Follower count: A simple tally of how many followers you have, either overall or on each individual social media account
2. Audience growth rate: Net new followers divided by total number of followers x 100 to get a percentage
3. Social media sentiment: This is a measure of how positive or negative the social conversation about your brand is. It’s tricky to measure, but the best social media measurement tools will calculate it for you.
4. Demographics: Basic aspects of your audience, like gender, age, location, as well as when they’re most often on each social platfor.

For your comparison, here are our latest findings on the average follower growth rate.

To go a little deeper here, analyze your audience demographics closely after any major shift in follower growth. You’re looking to see if the new audience aligns with the market you’re trying to reach. If not, you need to ask yourself some questions.

If you’re getting followers you didn’t expect, it may be that your target market is evolving, and your content strategy needs to shift accordingly. Or, it could be that you need to double down on crafting content that entertains, educates, and informs the most relevant audience for your brand rather than going for broad appeal.

For more details on these and other social marketing metrics, check out our post on essential metrics to measure social media success.

How to set up a smart social media measurement process: 5 steps

1. Set clear social media goals

Social media measurements on their own are interesting, but not all that useful. To get the most of your measurement efforts, you need to connect your social media metrics and KPIs to real business goals.

We’ve got a whole blog post dedicated to social media goal-setting and another on how to create key performance indicators to work toward those goals.

Keep in mind that your goals and associated measurement strategies may vary by platform, or even by campaign. The important thing is to know what you want to achieve with your data, rather than just collecting it because you can.

2. Choose the metrics you’ll track

The metrics you track should provide the data you need to track your goals and your progress toward your KPIs.

For example, if your primary goal for TikTok is building brand awareness, you’ll focus more on reach and audience metrics there. If you’re using shoppable posts on Instagram to drive sales, you’ll want to track conversions.

3. Set up analytics and social listening tools

All of the social media platforms have native analytics tools. These are a good place to get started with social media measurement, as they’re free to use and require very little set-up. We cover all the major native analytics solutions (plus Google Analytics) in our post on social analytics tools (this link takes you directly to the section on free tools).

We’ve also created a free social media reporting template where you can collect all your data for analysis.

For competitive and audience insights, you’ll also want to set up social listening. We’ve got a post dedicated to the best social listening tools to help you choose the one that works best for you.

If you’re not sure what to track, or how to find the data you need, check out the reporting templates in your social analytics tool of choice. Choose one that aligns with your goal, as it will be pre-populated with the most relevant metrics.

4. Connect your social measurement tools to your CRM

If you’re just getting started with social media measurement, you might want to skip this one for now. But if you’re comfortable with analytics tools and reporting, this can take things up a notch.

Connecting your social media measurement tools to your CRM improves the quality of data for all departments that work with customers or leads. You’ll have better audience data and gain a better understanding of how your social efforts fill your sales funnel. This can help with your attribution modeling.

5. Report and reassess

Many stakeholders across the organization are interested in your social media measurement findings. Plan out a regular reporting schedule to keep everyone informed with the data they need.

For instance, you’ll likely want the social team to review your data at least weekly, with a more in-depth dive to look for longer-term trends every month. For more senior stakeholders, a high-level monthly report might do the trick.

The key is to consider how people will use the data you report to them. Don’t overwhelm team members and stakeholders with data that’s not relevant to their role or decision-making.

When you review your data, assess whether your social marketing strategy is working. Are your goals still realistic? Is there something new on the horizon you need to start tracking? Every report is an opportunity to reassess and optimize.

Tip: Make sure your reporting highlights the social team’s contributions to real business value. This focus on social performance reinforces the importance of your work and your social media measurement plan.

Helpful tools for measuring social media success

1. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a really useful social media measurement tool because it combines social analytics and social listening (and a comprehensive set of other social media management features).

You easily measure the performance of all your social channels in one place, benchmark your performance against competitors, and track what people are saying about your brand online (as well as how they feel).

You can set up custom boards that give you an overview of your most important metrics at a glance, over a select period of time. The tool also makes it easy to create custom reports to showcase your results to your boss and share insights with your team.

Coolest feature: Get personalized recommendations for the best time to publish on each of your social platforms based on your desired goals, without having to calculate this manually from your social media measurements.

Best for: Teams focused on combining social listening data with social measurement metrics for a full social performance report.

Price: Hootsuite plans start at $99/month

2. Talkwalker

Talkwalker is a powerful social measurement tool that combines social listening and audience insights with media monitoring and social benchmarking to provide a full picture of your brand. It can help you identify positive and negative trends, understand where you fit in your niche, and gain deeper insights into your customer base.

Coolest feature: Talkwalker uses AI to analyze social sentiment on your most important topics and predict how it will change over the next 30 to 90 days.

Price: Pricing available on request

Best for: Social teams in larger organizations that collaborate with PR, marketing, and other communications teams to make the most of social measurement insights.

3. RivalIQ

RivalIQ is designed to focus on the data you need to make decisions quickly. It can measure and compare searches of brand mentions, hashtags, and topics to give you an understanding of what’s most popular in your sphere.

Coolest feature: Boosted post detection based on machine learning helps you understand why a competitor is seeing greater engagement rates.

Price: Plans start at $239/month

Best for: Agencies, nonprofits, and large brands.

Save time managing your social media presence with Hootsuite. Publish and schedule posts, find relevant conversions, engage your audience, measure results, and more — all from one dashboard. Try it free today.

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