Making sense of social media metrics in 4 simple steps

With reporting features built into individual social media channels as well as third-party management platforms, social media managers have performance data at their fingertips. But which metrics are important to your brand and what should you do with them? Below are a few simple steps to help track and manage social media performance.

1. Identify your goals and objectives

What are the goals of your social media efforts? Is the purpose to increase brand awareness, get more followers, drive higher engagement on posts, boost website traffic, gain new members or something else? Without clearly defined goals, you cannot identify the metrics that truly matter to your team.

2. Match the right metrics to your goals

Prioritize the key performance indicators (KPIs) relevant to your strategic objectives instead of tracking every available data point, which can overwhelm staff and stakeholders with unnecessary metrics. Using the different stages of the marketing funnel as an example of goals, here is an overview of applicable metrics.

Brand awareness: Use reach and impressions to understand your visibility. Reach is the metric that measures the number of unique users who see your content. Impressions count how often your posts appear, including multiple appearances to the same user. High reach indicates successful audience target alignment, while impressions track repeated visibility.

Consideration (engagement): Likes, comments and clicks reflect your audience’s interest. For many brands, the most important engagement metric is the engagement rate, calculated as Total Engagements ÷ Reach (x100). A rate between 1% and 5% is considered strong, though this may vary by platform and industry. For instance, according to analytics tools used by AOE, the construction industry’s average engagement rate by platform is:

• 2.77% for LinkedIn

• 2.09% for Instagram

• 1.75% for Facebook

• 0.9% for X (formerly Twitter)

Conversions (leads, sales, etc.): Track clicks, sign-ups, purchases, downloads or other specific actions to measure the tangible business impact of your social content. Google Analytics (GA4) and UTM parameters can be leveraged to get a more complete picture of how user interact with your posts, digital marketing content and website. Both are free and useful tools to track where your website traffic is coming from, what campaigns or marketing materials brought them there and what actions visitors take on your website.

3. Set a consistent reporting schedule

Once you’ve matched the metrics to your objectives, you’ll need to track their progress. Regular evaluations on KPIs ensure your strategy stays aligned with objectives—and your team can tweak or pivot as necessary. AOE recommends generating monthly reports. You can customize reports on most platforms (Meta Business Suite, Sprout Social, etc.) to compare week vs. week, month vs. month, quarter vs. quarter, year vs. year, etc.

4. Finally, build and review reports

Use benchmarks, such as industry averages or your brand’s historical data, to set baselines and identify trends and patterns over time. Consider external factors (i.e., holidays, seasons, business cycles) when interpreting spikes and dips in engagement. Where possible, segment by demographics to ensure your content resonates with the intended audiences.

Remember that you are looking for actionable data—information that can be used to make decisions and take action. The following are ways social media managers can use metrics to improve performance.

• Highlighting notable trends, such as high conversion rates from a specific platform or format (i.e., short-form videos or reels vs. text-based posts) helps determine which platforms and content types yield the best return on investment (ROI).

• Ad budgets can be adjusted to focus on platforms with higher ROI.

• Identifying content types (i.e., reels, photo stories, project updates, employee news/profiles, polls) that yield significant engagement helps with decision-making and provides justification for allocating resources toward enhancing or creating more content.

• Poor conversion rates often point to barriers related to landing page design, messaging or calls to action (CTAs). Review and test user journeys from social to conversion points to see where visitor numbers dropped off. This will help uncover and address weak areas and reduce friction.

• Comparing best-performing against underperforming posts can help fine-tune formats, timing and messaging.

As the saying goes, you cannot improve what you don’t measure. Once you identify the metrics that align with your social media strategy’s objectives, you can shed light on which content is driving engagement, leads, etc., and adjust the content that’s not.

For tips on effectively sharing performance data and other metrics with team members and decision-makers, read 5 steps to presenting social media metrics to stakeholders. And, of course, contact AOE.