Social media marketing metrics look vastly different today than they did even a few years ago.
Numbers used to define social success – the more likes, shares, and followers, the better. Yet, numbers are now falling behind in significance when examining success.
Connection is key.
If you’re not primarily focused on engaging with your target audience in a meaningful way, you risk falling behind.
Measuring social media impact must go beyond vanity metrics and will be a key determinant for expanding your social reach and follower loyalty.
It will deepen your understanding of where and how your audience engages with you most.
Engagement metrics reveal real impact. It leads you forward to improve facets of your social media marketing that deserve the most attention: how your followers perceive your business.
These metrics enable you to go beyond surface-level indicators and help you align with what social media algorithms now value most, such as adhering to privacy regulations and ethical data collection.
Savvy social marketers looking to gain an edge and adapt to the latest algorithm updates must stay on top of what to track.
This article will explore how forward-thinking brands and marketers alike are redefining success on myriad social media platforms.
We’ll examine why we’re moving beyond traditional metrics, best practices for metric measurement, and the tools and technology shaping the future of social media marketing.
The Problem With Vanity Metrics
Measuring social media success used to rely mostly on the numbers, tied to the amount of likes a post received or the number of people following an account.
The more the merrier, and it was easy to track, given more meant better. This number-based approach is referred to as “vanity metrics,” or how consumers interact with your brand at a surface level.
While vanity metrics can highlight how many people are interested in your business, they aren’t granular enough to truly measure why customers find your content interesting (or if they don’t).
Yet, vanity metrics offer some semblance of success, even if it’s an instant hit of dopamine. Who hasn’t gotten excited by seeing their follower numbers steadily grow or gaining over 1,000 likes on a post?
However, vanity metrics aren’t the sole measure of success and rarely tell the full story of how a brand is actually performing on social media.
Follows, impressions, and likes are only a small fraction of how engaging your social media efforts actually are.
Another pertinent issue with vanity metrics is how they tie to broader business goals. Sure, vanity metrics may measure how quickly your platform is growing, but they simply don’t capture how that translates into qualified leads, sales, and more.
Consider the following: A brand may have thousands of followers, but what if it isn’t capturing (or caring about) how many of those followers turn into paying customers?
This missed opportunity makes it hard to justify social media spend and the effort allocated towards this marketing effort.
For example, a post may receive 2,000 likes, which might lead a brand to think the post is a great success. However, without understanding who liked it or what drove the spike in likes, it’s impossible to pinpoint the true value of the post.
The simple truth is numbers fail to tell the whole story. Context is key and can only be gained when social media marketers move beyond vanity metrics.
In the future, shifting beyond likes will be crucial to having a full, comprehensive view of performance.
Key Metrics That Matter
As a social media marketer, it’s crucial to keep up with ever-evolving best practices to stay visible in the sea of social posts and ahead of the curve.
In fact, the average social media user spends about 143 minutes a day scrolling through their social platforms, leaving ample opportunity for brands to make an impression.
As social platform algorithms change, so too does how these platforms evaluate performance.
For example, media algorithms now favor and surface content that receives high engagement rather than displaying posts chronologically.
Right now, success on social platforms will look different, extending beyond traditional metrics of interest. Building quality connections with followers will win.
It’s no longer a popularity contest but building an authentic and genuine social presence with your customers, becoming a business customers can trust.
The new era of social media marketing metrics has arrived, and now is the time to up your metric tracking game.
Here are the metrics social media marketers should be tracking.
Engagement Metrics
Social media marketers are diving deeper, focusing on getting their audience to take meaningful action.
To do so, they must examine the depth of that engagement, digging deeper than likes alone.
Comments: A Free Form Of Feedback
There is much to be gained in feedback, including comments on social media. Comments can convey genuine emotion, both positive and negative.
Irrespective, both types of feedback highlight how captivating your content is. They can help your business gain a glimpse into what’s working and what isn’t, allowing you to mine for common themes within the context of your comments.
Tip: Focus on who is leaving thoughtful comments or questions, responding to those individuals whenever possible.
Sentiment: How Your Content Makes Your Customers Feel
How a customer feels about your business can often be understood through the context of a comment.
It’s likely emotion promoted the customer to comment in the first place, but knowing how to decipher the comment and the customer’s emotions helps brands take meaningful action. It can also highlight what’s working and what isn’t.
For example, perhaps videos capture your customers’ attention the most, and you may want to shift your content strategy to create more video-type content in the future.
Tip: Businesses should accurately track sentiment analysis to enhance their customer experience.
Conversion Metrics
Understanding what makes customers take action will always be a top metric to track. This won’t be any different this year, and social media marketers should continue to monitor conversion metrics.
Click-Through Rates: Encourage Action
Click-through rates (or CTR) enable you to see how compelling your content truly is. Do people feel motivated to take the next step and read more, learn more, or buy from you?
Tip: Track which posts are gaining the most traction in terms of clicks to determine what’s working well and what to replicate in the future.
Sales: Ensure Your Social Efforts Pay Off
In the social media realm, it’s important to keep a pulse on the type of messaging that is driving your audience to take the next step – whether that’s landing on a product page or signing up for a monthly newsletter.
Tip: It’s equally as important to attribute sales to your social media channels to get the most out of your marketing efforts.
Customer Retention Metrics
Social media isn’t just a tool for building a brand reputation and attracting new customers. It should also play a key role in retaining existing ones.
In fact, 88% of business leaders agree social media data is a must for improving customer retention and experiences.
Loyal customers want to come back to consume your content on your social media channels, and the right messaging can help develop deeper relationships.
Repeat Purchases: Keep The Revenue Rolling In
Demonstrating social media value is critical to encourage your customers to keep coming back for more.
Messaging might also differ between how you communicate with a prospect rather than a repeat customer.
Having revenue attribution in place is a must on social media to help you better personalize communication between these different audience segments.
Tip: Set up proper attribution to be able to tie repeat sales back to social media.
Loyalty: Becoming More Than A One-Time Purchase
Loyalty programs have long been a tried-and-true marketing tactic to entice repeat customer engagement. It also helps demonstrate value to your loyal customers by offering exclusive deals and promotions.
Tip: Ensure your loyalty signups are trackable through customized UTM links to be able to attribute new member sign-ups to your social efforts.
Tools And Technologies Empowering Brands
Social media marketing is getting smarter, leaning on emerging technologies to help enhance analytics, workflows, and performance.
This year, marketers can expect social platforms to grow more intelligent, increasingly relying on advanced technology, like artificial intelligence (AI), to fuel their platforms.
In turn, marketers can expect to see smarter insights, powering a clearer view of the metrics that measure success.
Here’s a closer look at how forward-thinking brands are leveraging technology to reshape their social strategies to improve experiences and marketing success.
AI
Undoubtedly, AI is transforming the way nearly every business operates.
Social media isn’t any different, enabling brands to measure success and even predict future performance with a precision never realized before.
AI-driven analytics are becoming deeply woven into the fabric of social media performance measurement.
In fact, predictive models can predetermine the success of a campaign before it even gets kicked off.
With the help of AI, brands can avoid costly campaigns that will likely lead to lackluster outcomes by analyzing historical data and previous campaign data.
This deep level of insight allows social media marketers to make informed decisions that lead to more desirable outcomes.
AI has the capability to predict optimal post time, and which day of the week is best to post, taking factors like time zones and target audience location into consideration as well.
In turn, social media marketers can more effectively get their content in front of more eyes.
In the social realm, AI has been a great help for marketers, enabling brands to get their messages in front of their desired audience more easily than ever before.
The good news is AI already has significant buy-in from organization leaders. A study found that 97% of leaders agree AI and machine learning (ML) enable businesses to analyze social media data and insights more efficiently.
Social Listening Tools
Social listening can lead to higher customer satisfaction rates. The 2025 Sprout Social Index found that 73% of social users will buy from a competitor if a brand doesn’t respond on social.
Your customers are talking, and if your brand isn’t listening, you risk losing their trust, loyalty, and hard-earned dollars.
Enter social listening tools, an easy way for brands to see what potential customers and customers alike are saying about their business.
With social listening tools, brands can track specific keywords and set alerts any time someone mentions these keywords.
For example, a brand might want to track relevant hashtags related to their product or service or be alerted any time a competitor is mentioned.
Rapid alerts enable brands to move quickly, replying directly to customers any time they’re in need of customer support.
If a product has a major defect that’s widespread, customers may turn to social media to share their grievances with their followers.
How you respond to this feedback sets the stage for if they’ll give your business the opportunity to course-correct, or if they’ll take their business elsewhere.
The same can apply to a gap in service.
For example, a fast-casual Mexican food restaurant sought to find out how they could improve customer experiences. The restaurant leveraged a mix of AI and social media listening tools to identify where there was friction in the customer journey.
Customers frequently mentioned long wait times in their social media feedback, prompting the restaurant to take quick action to remedy this consistent complaint. The result? Better experiences and happier customers.
Integrated Dashboards
To successfully scale as a marketing entity, integrated dashboards are a must. The right technology allows marketers to view all their data in one centralized location.
From social media metrics to local search performance, technology should empower marketers to make better decisions with a clear view of their performance.
In theory, marketers should be able to have a clear picture of the entire customer journey, from the time a customer first searches for a business on Google to what page they land on to checking out.
A unified approach helps marketers measure how social media campaigns contribute to other organizational efforts such as lead generation, purchasing, and more.
Integrated dashboards also allow different teams to assess performance at a higher level.
Content marketers are able to see how their efforts coincide with social media marketers with a transparent view of social media metrics. It also allows teams to easily share their impact with C-level colleagues.
Next Steps For Social Media Marketers Ready To Make An Impact
As we’ve explored throughout this blog post, the days of measuring social media impact by simply looking at followers or like numbers are long gone.
This year, measuring social media impact will rely on looking at the right metrics and integrating the right technology.
Social media marketers will want to consistently showcase the results through integrated dashboards with their broader team to highlight the positive impact they’re making on the business.
By sharing how social media efforts tie to broader business goals, social media marketers can elevate their careers. It’s not all about the business, though; the real drivers of success are loyal and engaged customers.
Social media metrics do more than show what’s working and what isn’t. They show whether your potential and current customers care to consume your content.
Now that the new year has come, it’s time for brands to reassess their social media strategies. Are you relying on metrics that don’t show the full picture? Or are you adopting the strategies, tools, and technology that lead to better customer outcomes?
More Resources:
- Making Social Media & SEO Work Together
- 20 Awesome Examples Of Social Media Marketing
- Social Media Marketing: A Complete Strategy Guide
Featured Image: ImageFlow/Shutterstock
