Social media used to be all about the amount of followers you had and gaining followers was a normal goal for social media.
Nowadays, we know that the follower count doesn’t matter, or at least doesn’t matter as much as many people believe.
We are often told to focus on other metrics, like our engagement rate.
Why? Because your engagement rate shows how engaged your audience is, which tends to be an accurate indicator of whether your content resonates with your audience.
However, we’re here to tell you that focusing on the numbers too much won’t do you any good.
Let us explain.
Why social media metrics don’t matter as much as we like to think
Every marketer’s goal is to improve their KPIs (key performance indicators).
For social media, these are often your reach, engagement, profile clicks, etc.
The reason people like to track their metrics is because it helps them understand whether their strategy is working and whether their content is performing well.
If the metrics don’t look good, it can be a sign that your content or your strategy needs improvement.
And this is the exact reason why we don’t like stressing about the metrics.
Just because your numbers are low one month doesn’t mean your strategy isn’t working. There are numerous other factors to consider that are likely to affect your numbers, for example, vacation times, Holiday seasons, world events, etc.
Historically, we know that November and December are when people buy a lot (Holiday sales, shopping for gifts, etc.)
You might see this in your metrics by a drastic increase in website visits from your social media accounts, as well as your overall sales.
January and February, however, tend to be the slowest months for businesses.
Most people just spent a lot of money getting through the Holiday season and want to start the new year with good spending habits and less consumption.
This is great for their wallets, not so great for businesses looking to make money.
You might notice this shift more in your analytics as well.
People trying to buy less tend to spend less time on social media to avoid temptation.
They might not engage with your content as much and this will show in your numbers.
But - is this a reason to go back to the drawing board and revamp your entire strategy? Of course not!
Now Holiday seasons are just one thing that can affect your metrics.
Depending on your niche, you might see even more seasonality: a swimsuit brand might see an uptick in the spring and summer when people are shopping for beach outfits, but a drastic decline in the colder winter months.
The key is to understand the surrounding factors that influence your numbers and read your metrics accordingly.
We’ve had plenty of clients whose numbers were red one month and green the next, without any changes in content or strategy.
The takeaway? Don’t stress about red numbers for a month or two, chances are things will flip around by the next month already.
If you do continue to see red numbers month after month, it might be time to give your strategy a glow-up!
Best social media metrics to track
The best metrics to track for social media will depend on your overall business goals and should be well thought out.
Here are our favorites to track, and why:
Profile Activity:
Profile visits: Profile visits are great because they show that someone saw a post of yours and decided to check out your profile and potentially scroll through more posts.
External link taps: This gives you a great idea of how many people were very intrigued by your social media profile, so much so that they want to find out more about your products. This could be an indicator of purchase intent, or even real purchases.
Accounts Reached:
This number shows the total amount of individuals who have seen your content. You can see how many % of those accounts were reached through ads (giving you an idea of how your organic & paid content is performing respectively), as well as how many % of those accounts are followers vs. non-followers. The reason this is valuable information is that it shows whether you’re actually reaching new audiences, or whether your content is mostly being shown in your current follower’s feeds.
By content type: Always pay attention to the reach by content type section. This shows you how many people your reels, posts, stories and videos individually reach. You want this knowledge to determine what type of content is performing best for you (hint: for all our clients, it’s Reels by far)
Engagement
Over the last few years, engagement has been singled out as the most important metric to track.
The reason for this is that the algorithms favor posts with a lot of engagement. For an algorithm, a lot of engagement means people are loving a post, which the algorithm uses as a sign to push the post out to even more people.
This in turn increases your reach & impressions. Paying attention to your engagement will also show you what content your audience loves so you can create more content like it.
Engagement rate: Your engagement rate is calculated like this: total engagement divided by total followers, multiplied by 100%. Knowing your engagement rate is helpful as a benchmark to compare your engagement to industry standards, as well as to track it over time
Likes, comments, shares: Keep track of your likes, comments, shares. The more engagement your posts receive, the more people genuinely enjoy your content. Remember, a lot of people tend to participate passively on social media, meaning they scroll through posts without actively engaging with your content. Low engagement doesn’t necessarily mean people didn’t enjoy your post.
Video completion rate: This is probably one of our favorite ( and most underrated) metrics to track. The video completion rate shows you how many people watched your video from start to finish. In today’s fast paced social media where everyone’s attention span is shorter than a fly’s, getting people to watch your whole video is a true testament to your content capturing their attention.
Impressions
Now you might be wondering whether you should be tracking both your reach as well as impressions. After all, aren’t they kind of the same?
Yes and no. Here’s the difference: your reach is the total amount of accounts that have seen your content. Impressions are the total number of times your content was seen, including some accounts seeing it multiple times.
Your impressions tend to be higher than your reach as it’s normal for your content to be seen several times by one account. This can indicate whether people come back to see your content again.
Social media metrics not to track
Now, we can’t tell you not to track any metrics per se, after all, it really depends on your business objectives which metrics to track and which ones to disregard.
However, we’ve found the following to be irrelevant in most cases:
Follower count
Often referred to as a vanity metric, it really doesn’t give you much information about your audience’s interests, preferences, or purchase intent.
On the other hand, it can be useful to compare your own growth to your competitor’s growth and to keep track of whether you’re growing your audience.
How we track social media analytics for clients
We don’t believe in overanalyzing metrics (as the title of the blog post suggests).
We like to do a monthly check-in to take note of all metrics, and highlight notable changes.
We create reports for our clients to make all data easily digestible.
As needed, we include recommendations for adjustments to our content strategy. Again, this isn’t needed every month, even if the numbers are in the red.
We only recommend changing the strategy if there’s data to support the assumption that a different strategy would improve performance.
Making informed decisions based on social media metrics
It really comes down to understanding what each metric is telling you about your content performance, and whether this is actually helpful to you.
Not all metrics need to be relevant to you.
Red numbers don’t mean you’re doing everything wrong.
The key to interpreting your metrics is to take both a close-up view of your metrics as well as a birds-eye view of everything else that’s going on in terms of Holidays, seasonality, etc.
Tracking your data is important for growth and to make adjustments as needed, but don’t overthink it and don’t read too much into it.
After all, social media does move at its own speed, and not every little thing will be explained by the quality of your content.
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