(800) 854-6735
Measuring growth is one of the most critical components for most marketing objectives. This includes a healthy social media strategy. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) make working towards and achieving milestones more possible. They force you to quantify what success looks like, giving you the ultimate benchmark for the true ROI and impact of a project or department.
Social media KPIs help you identify where your focus should be. No more pouring resources into tasks that have little or no relevance to your overarching vision—these metrics give you the guardrails you need to formulate a powerful action plan.
With the right KPIs, your team can develop a growth strategy that aligns with your organization’s primary mission. Better yet, it’ll be measurable!
Read more: How to Manage Your Online Reputation with Social Media Metric Tracking
Another benefit of having a clear set of KPIs is improved internal communications. Social media metrics can get confusing, especially if other departments aren’t very familiar with them. By clearly outlining your KPIs for brand awareness and other objectives, you’ll be able to communicate quickly with other marketing directors and strategists. As a result, they can get timely updates on your performance. This ensures that team members at every level understand the impact of your work. But with so many potential goals to explore, knowing what to concentrate on can be a challenge. In this post, we’ll look at some of the most important stats you should be tracking and why.
Why Is It Important to Set KPIs?
Social media is an extremely valuable tool for building authentic relationships and communicating with your online audience. It establishes trust, loyalty, and engagement and helps promote your company’s products or services in a tangible and effective way.
But to extract the highest amount of value possible from your social media strategy, you need a way to set, measure, and understand its performance process.
That’s where KPIs, including brand awareness KPIs, come in.
KPIs provide a transparent performance measurement system that enables your team to gauge its effectiveness and see what needs to change. Strong KPIs benefit your entire organization by clarifying its present position and outlining clear objectives for the future.
13 Social Media KPIs Everyone Should Be Tracking
In the dizzying landscape of social media, consumers’ attention spans are about as precious as gold. But what good is their attention if they’re not acting on it? You will constantly be toeing the line between awareness, reach, and conversions.
Yes, captivating your audience is crucial. But that’s the first step in the process. You need to support it by building engagement, eventually feeding into conversions. Your social media mix needs to service the entire sales funnel, and that’s where your KPI focus should start. These 13 KPIs represent the primary metrics for measuring the efficacy of your company’s social media strategy. They account for every step of the consumer journey while giving you that all-important umbrella performance and channel health.
Engagement Rate
Tracking engagement metrics is essential in social media marketing. The number of likes or reactions, comments, saves, and shares per post offers valuable insight into how consumers perceive your content.
But another engagement metric that often gets ignored is the applause rate. Applause rates measure exclusively positive engagements, such as likes, heart reactions, saves, and favoriting a post. After all, a high volume of reactions isn’t always a good thing. Remember to differentiate between the two.
While it’s beneficial to understand engagement overall, it’s also worth doing a qualitative deep dive monthly. That way, you can unpack the comments, giving you a more comprehensive indication of audience sentiment.
Benchmarks
Across industries, the average engagement rate for social media posts varies widely. Use these benchmarks to set realistic goals and understand where improvements are needed:
- Instagram post average engagement rate: 3.5%
- Facebook post average engagement rate: 1.3%
- X post average engagement rate: 1.8%
- LinkedIn post average engagement rate: 3.4%
Engagement rate reflects how well your content resonates with your audience. You’re not just tracking how many people see a post, but how many care enough to interact. A consistently strong engagement rate can signal brand loyalty, content relevance, and potential for organic reach growth, while low engagement rates can indicate a need to revisit content themes, posting times, and audience alignment.
How to Increase Employee Engagement on Social Media
Learn 5 simple practices that can help you tap into your team’s vast social networks for amplification and reliable engagement.
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
Your brand's CTR, often regarded as a key metric among paid social KPIs, represents the number of times people clicked on a call-to-action link or button compared to the total reach. If your CTR is high, it means that your marketing messaging and call-to-actions are effective. Ultimately, it indicates whether your work prompts consumers to take the desired action. On social media, CTR data shows you the percentage of users who found the content or call-to-action you posted relevant enough to take action or leave the social media platform and visit the page, product, or content you shared. It’s a great metric to track content relevancy and audience targeting.
Benchmarks
Click-through rates on social media may be slightly lower than other channels, so creating content and CTAs that are targeted and relevant enough to motivate clicks is an essential part of strategic planning. Take a look at these social media CTR benchmarks to see what you should aim for:
- Average YouTube CTR: 0.65%
- Average Facebook CTR: 1.11%
- Average LinkedIn CTR: 0.22%
- Average social media CTR: 1.1% – 1.3%
By revealing how often your audience is moved to take an action through your social media content, CTRs help indicate when your messaging and CTAs are resonating and prompting clicks that can lead to move users down your sales funnel—a key principle of effective social selling.
Impressions
Social media impressions represents the number of times a post is visible in someone’s timeline or feed. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the person has read or acknowledged it but that it made an appearance on their screen. Impressions are important to track because more views lead to more engagement and can boost your conversion rate. It’s a powerful KPI for brand awareness as it signifies how often your content is being displayed.
Benchmarks
Impressions typically range from 1,000 to 10,000 viewers per post for brands that have a moderate follower count. Keep these impressions benchmarks in mind (shown in impressions per post):
- Average Facebook reach: 1,500–2,500
- Average Instagram reach: 1,000–5,000
- Average X reach: 500–3,000
- Average LinkedIn reach: 1,000–4,000
Engagement fuels reach. The higher your engagement on a post, the further it goes as social algorithms push high-interaction posts to the top of others’ feeds. This metric is necessary for comprehending social media impact, giving you the number of eyeballs who might have encountered your content.
How engaged are your social followers–and how much ROI are you really driving? This free guide breaks it down: Find the Perfect Social Media Mix for Your Marketing Strategy
Profile Visits
Whether driven by organic efforts or by KPIs for paid social media, an indispensable metric to monitor is your website's traffic. You need to know what percentage originates on social media. If you’re investing significant time and money into your social media marketing strategy, you want to ensure it is effective in funneling consumers to your landing page. In contrast to profile visits, this metric goes beyond the platform. If on Instagram, this could refer to users who clicked a link in your bio or a swipe-up link in your story, directing them to your website.
One way to determine traffic is by monitoring your landing page performance. If you're leading users to a particular webpage from your paid social media ads, observe the results of that page. This means checking not only how many visitors land on the page but also what they do once they're there. Do they sign up, make a purchase, or simply leave?
Benchmarks
Social media traffic referrals differ by platform, but viewing overall and network-specific averages will allow you to monitor and analyze this KPI in comparison to broader benchmarks:
- Average traffic referrals (all networks): ~5% –15% of total website traffic
- Average Facebook traffic referrals: ~60% of total social media referrals
- Average Instagram traffic referrals: ~20% of total social media referrals
- Average X traffic referrals: ~10% of total social media referrals
- Average LinkedIn traffic referrals: ~5% of total social media referrals
Social media traffic is a tangible way to measure your brand’s ability to move audiences from discovery to action. A healthy percentage of social referrals indicates that your content and CTAs are compelling enough to drive users past the feed. When this KPI holds steady or declines, it’s a signal to refresh your content mix, bio links, or post relevance to boost performance and conversions.
Amplification Rate
This metric measures the rate of followers who are sharing your content with their own audience. Your company’s social media amplification rate shows the volume of consumers willing to be openly associated with your brand. This is a critical component of a healthy social media strategy. You can measure your amplification rate through the number of reposts, retweets, re-pins, or any other type of share.
Benchmarks
Because shares and follower counts differ widely by brand, industry, and social network, amplification rate averages and benchmarks don’t carry as much meaning as your own historical data. The goal is earning more shares over time by promoting engaging, compelling content. Calculate your amplification rate by dividing a post’s share count by your follower count, then track this data over time to look for trends. This is a powerful way to measure how much your audience wants to actively endorse your brand by spreading your message to their own networks. It matters because their organic shares help your content break beyond your immediate audience and extend reach cost-effectively.
Bounce Rate
Unfortunately, not everyone who clicks on a social media link or CTA button sticks around to absorb the messaging. In fact, some brands have a fantastic CTR, and their traffic metrics are high, but their bounce rate is through the roof. Ultimately, this means your marketing messaging or content is effective, but consumers aren’t finding value in your website. This instant drop-off is an excellent indicator of audience relevance and the effectiveness of your website content or layout.
Benchmarks
The average bounce rate from social media referral traffic is around 54% across industries. This benchmark data varies by industry, but it's important to note that social traffic often bounces at a higher rate than other channels because users are eager to return to browsing their feeds.
This content relevancy barometer indicates how well you’re targeting your audience with blog posts, website tools, and information, but it also functions as a measure of site usability. Focusing on delivering value through content, a great user experience on your site, and making information easy to navigate can help you reduce your bounce rate.
Cost Per Click (CPC)
Your CPC rate represents how much money your brand spends on clicks for sponsored posts. Tracking this amount will ensure your brand gets the most out of paid media. You’ll always be hunting for the lowest CPC. There’s a correlation between audience targeting, content, and CPC, making it a valuable metric to keep an eye on. CPC is calculated by dividing your total cost by total clicks for a given ad campaign. The less each click costs, the more cost-effectively you can generate leads on social media. And the more clicks cost, the faster you spend your ad budget.
Benchmarks
CPC averages by different paid social channels are essential to know—what’s an excellent CPC on LinkedIn might be astronomically high for X. Keep these benchmarks in mind:
- Facebook Ads: $0.63
- LinkedIn Ads: $5.58
- Instagram Ads: $0.40–$0.70
- X Ads: $0.38
It’s an essential metric to gauge your advertising efficiency. By monitoring CPC closely, you can balance your targeting and creative strategy to optimize every cent of social media ad spend while ensuring clicks are valuable and cost-effective.
The Ultimate Playbook for Social Selling Success
Your shortcut to social selling success is starting with a game plan. This is your step-by-step guide to making your social a sales engine.
Conversion Rate
How many of your company’s social media posts result in purchases, sign-ups, website visits, or other desirable consumer actions? A conversion rate KPI will tell you exactly that. You can calculate your audience’s conversion rate by comparing the number of total clicks on a post with the number of desired actions that occur directly from it. A high conversion rate is hugely important because it signifies that your audience is responding to your strategy.
Benchmarks
Monitoring your average conversion rate and comparing it to broader benchmark data is a great way to start tracking the true ROI of your social content.
- Average conversion rate: ~3%
- Average Facebook conversion rate: 9.21%
- Average LinkedIn conversion rate: 5–15%
- Average Instagram conversion rate: 1.08%
- Average X conversion rate: 0.77%
Because this KPI directly measures the effectiveness of your content and targeting, a strong conversion rate signals that your social media strategy isn't just attracting clicks but delivering real ROI.
Audience Growth Rate
KPIs for awareness campaigns provide insights into how potent your campaign is at increasing your brand's visibility and recall among your target demographic. Your audience should be expanding, not contracting. Setting an audience growth rate KPI can help your team track the development of your online presence and illustrate how follower counts evolve and change over time. You can calculate your growth rate using basic math. Keep a weekly or monthly tally so it’s easy to identify trends.
Benchmarks
Keeping up with benchmarks is a practical way to create strategic goals for follower gains on the most popular social networks. These audience growth rates are what brand pages see on average per month:
- Average Facebook audience growth rate: ~14.53%
- Average Instagram audience growth rate: ~1.37%
- Average LinkedIn audience growth rate: ~0.85%
- Average X audience growth rate: ~ 0.5%
A high audience growth rate tells you that your content is consistently attracting new users, which is vital for boosting brand awareness and reach. Contrast that with stagnating or diminishing growth, which can indicate that your content is less relevant to your target audience. Regular measurement helps you identify when to pivot strategies to broaden visibility.
Followers (Active Vs. Passive)
A high follower count doesn’t necessarily mean a high engagement rate. Why? Because not all followers are active online. Many sign up, browse, follow some accounts, and never visit the profile again. Others may follow you but have their feeds taken up by other brands, rendering them passive. Tracking the number of both active and passive followers can help your brand know where to focus its attention when it comes to engagement.
Benchmarks
Active follower ratios are closely tied to your social media engagement rates. It’s valuable to track engagement closely while paying attention to the percentage of your followers who tend to “lurk” without directly interacting with your page’s content. Other trends to watch for are high post reach with minimal engagement, which can indicate a more passive audience.
Consumer Satisfaction Score (CSat)
Many social media platforms provide the option for hosting polls with numerical options (i.e., rate your satisfaction on a scale of 1–5). These allow consumers to give feedback on their experiences with your brand, which is something you can leverage. Your brand’s CSat can be measured by asking your followers how happy they are about your products or services. Measuring CSat involves taking your total number of positive (like a 4 or 5 rating on a scale of 1–5) audience responses to your survey or social media poll, then dividing it by the total number of responses. Multiply the result by 100 to get your CSat percentage.
Benchmarks
On average, CSat scores are around 62.5%. The number of positive responses will provide valuable insight into how your audience really perceives you and what you can improve on to make them more satisfied.
Share of Voice
"Share of Voice" (SOV) is a brand awareness KPI that shows how often your brand is mentioned compared to competitors. This metric helps gauge your brand's digital impact and guide your strategy. It’s also tied to growth and increased market share: for every 10% higher a brand’s extra SOV (ESOV) is than its market share (SOM), the brand can expect a 0.05% gain in market share. If your SOV is less than key competitors, delve into their content to discern what they're doing differently. Are they addressing topics you aren't, or is their content more engaging? Alternatively, a sudden increase in SOV can indicate that specific content resonated. Analyze the traits of this content and consider producing more in the same vein. Calculating SOV requires dividing your total brand mentions in a month by the total number of mentions in your industry or category (including competitor brand mentions), then multiplying the result by 100. If your brand is mentioned 800 times in a month, and the total mentions in your industry are 8,000, your SOV is 10%.
Benchmarks
Share of Voice (SOV) varies by industry, but these averages provide a helpful starting point for understanding the bigger picture of your brand’s visibility:
- Overall Average: 10%–30%
- E-commerce: 15%–25%
- B2B/SaaS: 10%–20%
- Travel & Hospitality: 25%–40%
- Food & Beverage: 10%–20%
- Healthcare: 15%–30%
SOV is a powerful metric in understanding how effectively your brand is dominating online conversations surrounding your industry or product. Social listening tools that track brand mentions and allow you to monitor industry-specific keywords are essential to analyze this KPI and gain clarity on how often your brand appears in relevant conversations.
Best Practices: How to Get the Most Out of Your KPIs
Now that you know which social media KPIs you should be tracking, let's get stuck into some best practices for bringing them to life.
Define your big-picture objectives – Think beyond just data. What is the greater purpose behind your KPIs? How do the metrics you and your team track actually fit into your organization’s long-term strategy? Defining your objectives helps you and your team understand the bigger picture.
Measure current performance – You can’t measure growth unless you truly understand your starting point. Establishing your social media strategy’s current performance rates will serve as helpful benchmark data for reaching your social media goals.
Differentiate between platforms – Each social media platform should have its own approach to KPI setting because each one uses different metrics for engagement. Remember to draw up your KPIs based on which platforms your company uses.
Be realistic – Don’t set social media KPIs that aren’t realistically achievable for your company or industry. Consider the scale, budget, and social media goals first so that you can work towards hitting KPIs consistently and confidently.
Regularly review – There’s no point in setting KPIs if you aren’t doing regular digital marketing reports of their progression. Schedule monthly, quarterly, and annual review sessions to reflect on your growth. If you’re falling short, you could be making one of the 6 most common social media strategy mistakes (fortunately, they’re all easy to fix).
How To Set Social Media KPIs – Native vs. External Solutions
When setting social media KPIs, you have two main options: native and external solutions. Native solutions are the built-in social media tracking and measurement systems platforms provide. Instagram Business, Meta Business Suite, and X for Business fall into the native solutions category. They equip brands with basic but current tools for tracking site-relevant KPIs and provide insights into consumer data. However, native tools are limited in their capacity for growth. They don’t allow for an integrative perspective on multiple channels. It can be bitty and time-intensive from a reporting perspective. External solutions, on the other hand, take a much more expansive and integrative route to KPI tracking by centralizing data from every social platform for easier viewing and tracking. Any organization that offers social media marketing, strategy, or employee advocacy tools falls into this category. Equipped with the tools, resources, and applied professional experience, external solutions like Clearview Social can enable your team to set, measure, and hit vital KPIs.
Track Every KPI That Matters in One Dashboard
Tracking KPIs is only powerful if you can see the full picture. Clearview Social’s robust analytics dashboard brings all your most important social media metrics across platforms into a simple, one-screen view. From click-through rates and amplification to engagement, reach, and lead tracking, you’ll know exactly what’s working, what’s not, and where to focus next to improve ROI. Clearview Social doesn’t just track the numbers. We help you elevate them. Our automation tools make it effortless for employees to share pre-written, brand-approved content with one click, while gamification keeps your team engaged and motivated to amplify your reach. It’s how brands drive measurable impact, greater visibility, and a stronger social presence, all powered by your people. Ready to see your KPIs come to life? Get a free walkthrough now and discover how Clearview Social unites powerful social media analytics with effortless employee advocacy to grow your brand faster. See the impact of automation, AI, and employee-powered engagement by scheduling your free demo today.
Create a Winning Social Media Program
Boost your brand’s social media reach and get your employees sharing company content with a powerful, all-in-one employee advocacy software.