Social Media Metrics You Should Be Tracking in 2022

Feb 8

Like any form of marketing, we’re all about approaching social with an informed strategy. We’ve shared time and time again that regularly tracking social media analytics provides key insights into what may and may not have performed as well as expected. Using this insight is ESSENTIAL for instructing your social media strategy to follow.

The metrics you should be tracking are entirely dependent on your goals as a brand. The most common objectives we see are to: increase brand awareness, foster a relationship with followers, and/or increase sales. If any of these goals sound like you and your biz, download our Social Media Analytics Bundle and read on for the social media metrics you should be tracking to guarantee success!

BRAND AWARENESS METRICS:

Brand awareness refers to the extent consumers are familiar with your brand. If your immediate goal is to increase brand awareness, pay extra attention to and formulate your strategy around increasing reach, shares, and followers.

REACH

Reach is the number of users that have seen your post aka the number of users your post reached.

Here are a few strategies we love for increasing the reach of our posts:

Use hashtags
Use location tags
Include a call-to-action prompting users to tag a user in the comments or share the post
Post Instagram Reels

Would you believe us if we told you that incorporating Reels into our content strategy allowed us to see a 91% increase in our Instagram following in only one quarter? Learn more about how you can leverage the reach of Reels in our ReelTok Course.

Shares is the metric referring to the number of times your post was sent to another account for viewing. The best way to increase shares is to ensure your content provides value in some way by either being relatable, entertaining, or educational. Essentially, give them a reason to share your post!

FOLLOWERS

Your followers are the number of accounts that follow you. It is also a vanity metric, meaning it’s a number that can make us feel good but doesn’t really tell us a lot. Regardless, an increase in your follower count can be a good indicator of increased brand awareness.

RELATIONSHIP METRICS:

If your immediate goal is to foster a relationship with your current audience, pay extra attention to and formulate your strategy around increasing your Instagram Story views and engagement rate, which is influenced by likes, comments, saves, and shares.

INSTAGRAM STORY VIEWS

Instagram Story views are the number of users that have seen your Story. We have a whole Instagram Stories Course detailing why you NEED to be sharing on Stories every day to foster a relationship with your audience, but essentially, the more daily Story viewers you have, the larger your engaged audience is. The key to increasing this number is to prompt engagement on your story through stickers like polls, questions, quizzes, etc.

ENGAGEMENT RATE

Engagement is any form of interaction on your post. A user can engage with your content through:

LIKES

This is the number of users that double-tapped or tapped the heart icon on your post.

COMMENTS

This is the number of comments your post received.

SAVES

This is the number of users that saved your post to refer back to later.

This is the number of users that shared the post to their story OR sent the post to another account for viewing.

These four metrics contribute to your engagement rate, which is a percentage revealing the level of engagement your post received from those who saw it. Therefore, the more likes, comments, saves, and shares a post has, the higher that post’s engagement rate.

To calculate the engagement rate of your post, use this formula:

Engagement rate = engagement / impressions OR followers

And remember:

Engagement = total number of likes + comments + saves + shares on your post

So, why is this all important? A high engagement rate signifies that your audience is engaged and interested in having a relationship with you.

Plus, a high engagement rate also signals to the algorithm that the content is valuable and that users enjoyed seeing it. Therefore, the higher the engagement rate, the higher the chance of the post being pushed to more users by the algorithm. This “push” is done both via users’ home feeds and the Explore page.

To learn more about the Instagram algorithm, check out our Own Your Instagram Course.

CONVERSION METRICS:

If your immediate goal is to increase sales, you’ll want to first make sure your brand awareness is up and then pay extra attention to and formulate your strategy around increasing website clicks and engagement rate.

WEBSITE CLICKS

Website clicks are the number of taps on the website in your profile. An increase in clicks to the website shows that users are moving further down your marketing funnel and warming up to making a purchase!

ENGAGEMENT RATE

Andddd it all comes back to engagement. Without engaging content, the algorithm won’t push your content for a large pool of users to see. The less users that see your posts, the less likely they’ll think about your brand and head to your website, so maintaining a solid engagement rate is key! To easily keep tabs on your engagement rate, check out this Instagram Engagement Rate Calculator.

We hope you found this blog post helpful in learning more about what analytics for social media you should be tracking this year according to your social media goals. Want more organic social media analytics tips? Check out our latest course on social media analytics, Decode Your Data. Enjoy!

Until then, we’ll catch ya on the ‘Gram and in our social media newsletter!

xx- The Homies

Dominique Oliver