What Are Social Media KPIs? 25 Examples + How to Track Them

KPI stands for key performance indicator.

Social media changes fast, and there’s a lot of performance data available. Those factors combined mean it’s easy to get bogged down in the measurement details and lose sight of the bigger picture.

Tracking KPIs keeps you focused on real business goals. Rather than the numbers alone, you’re looking at how the numbers impact the direction your business is going. You understand how you’re progressing toward your goals, and whether you need to make strategic changes along the way.

Your social media KPIs should always be tied to an overall strategic goal. Ask yourself: what’s the end game?

For example, is the goal of your social campaigns to increase brand awareness? Drive website traffic? Or to get more conversions and sales?

Once you decide on a strategic direction, it’s time to break that down into individual goals and associated KPIs for social media. For example, if your end game is to drive website traffic, then one of your KPIs might be tied to the number of clicks from social media to your site.

But to set realistic KPI targets, you first need to…

What does success look like for social accounts similar to yours?

With Hootsuite’s social media benchmarking, you can find out how others in your industry are doing on social and compare your results for social media metrics like:

• Profile impressions
• Profile reach
• Followers
• Audience growth rate
• Engagement rate
• Video plays
• Posting frequency
• Clicks
• Shares

You can also get even more granular and compare your performance to specific competitors rather than your industry as a whole.

Now that you know how your KPIs will support your business goals, decide on the specific metrics that will help you measure your progress.

For example, if your business is focused on growth and you want to build brand awareness on social media, you might want to measure and track Instagram Reels views.

For each KPI, craft a statement that incorporates all the SMART elements along with the relevant metrics. We’ll break down some examples later in this post.

KPIs include a set timeframe for success, but you can’t wait until that time has elapsed to check in on your progress. Choose a reporting pattern that will help you clearly see growth and developments, and react quickly when things aren’t working great.

This is where you’ll really dig into the metrics associated with your KPIs, and look for strategic ways to improve your results. Are things moving in the right direction? At the pace you’d planned?

You can also dig deeper here and analyze standout successes (or missteps) to see what lessons you can apply to your overall strategy as you work towards achieving your KPIs.

Remember: No company’s business goals are set in stone—that means the social media KPIs you set will also need to evolve over time.

Schedule regular strategic reviews of your KPIs. Are they still relevant? Are they still helping you meet company goals? Should changes be made?

Remember: why and how you set KPIs for social media could change as the business changes. They could also change for external reasons, like algorithm updates or the emergence of new platforms.

We’ve broken the building blocks of social media KPIs down into five categories:

• Reach
• Engagement
• Conversion
• Social customer service
• Social commerce

Remember, your social media KPIs will incorporate SMART components like targets and timeframes. Think of the KPIs below as the foundation, and those SMART components as the building elements that make your KPIs unique to your business and your strategic goals.

Reach KPIs measure how many users come across your social media channels.

Think of reach as a quantity measurement—reach data demonstrates your existing and potential audience, growth over time, and brand awareness.

This is the number of times your post was visible in someone’s feed or timeline. This doesn’t necessarily mean the person who viewed the post noticed it or watched it, but you know for sure it appeared on their screen.

The number of followers your social channel has at a set time.

You want to make sure you’re gaining followers, not losing them. Audience growth rate demonstrates how your follower count is changing over time. To track this metric, divide your net new followers by your total follower count.

This is how many people see a post. Reach changes based on factors like when your audience is online and how good your content is. It gives you an idea of what your audience finds valuable and interesting.

The number of times followers interact with a social post by tapping the Like button within a given social media platform.

The number of times people comment on your posts. A comment requires more effort than a simple like and is generally considered to represent a higher level of engagement.

How many times users click the link in your post. This helps track how people are engaging with content beyond the social platform.

How many times your post has been shared from one user to another. This is a great measure of how engaging and viral your content is.

Saves (or bookmarks) generally indicate that people like your content and find it useful enough that they plan to return to it later. This is a good indication that you’ve provided something educational, entertaining, or otherwise valuable to your audience.

This metric divides all the engagement a post receives — including likes, comments, saves and shares — by the total number of followers on your social account. It shows how engaging, on average, your content was.

This is a measure of how much your followers extend your reach by sharing your content with their own followers. A high amplification rate shows that your followers want to be associated with your brand or find your content valuable enough to pass along.

Here’s how to calculate it:

This metric tracks how many people mentioned your brand, compared to the number of people mentioning your competitors. It shows how relevant your brand is within your industry.

Conversion KPIs on social media reveal whether your social strategy is leading to real-world outcomes beyond the social sphere.

CTR is the percentage of people who viewed your post and clicked on the CTA (call to action) it included. This provides insight into whether your content captures your audience’s attention and inspires them to act.

Here’s how to calculate it:

Not everyone who clicks on your social media links will follow through, reading the full article you shared or completing a purchase.

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who clicked on a link in your social post, but then quickly left that page without taking any action. You want this to be low—it signals the user experience you provided didn’t match expectations.

CPC is the amount you pay for each individual click on your social media ad. Track this to see if the amount you’re spending is a worthwhile investment.

This is the amount you pay every time 1,000 people are served your social media ad. Since this is all about awareness rather than conversion, you want the cost to stay relatively low. Make sure you understand your sales funnel so you can tie the value of exposure to real business growth.

This metric shows how happy your customers are with their experience following an interaction with your social customer service team.

To get this data, you need to send users a survey after their customer service experience asking them to rate their level of satisfaction with the interaction. A tool like Hootsuite Inbox can send CSAT surveys automatically and pull the data into Hootsuite Analytics for reporting.

Customer lifetime value refers to the total amount of money that a customer will spend on your product or service over their entire lifetime as a customer. Understanding your CLV gives you a sense of how much you can afford to invest on individual customer acquisition.

Here’s how to calculate CLV:

CLV = Average purchase value x Average purchase frequency x Average customer lifespan

This measures how often customers get resolution from the first agent they speak to. If you’re using an automated assignment tool, this measures how well the tool understands customer requests and which team member can answer them.

Customers get increasingly frustrated each time they are passed along to another team member, especially if they have to keep explaining their problem, so a higher first contact rate will generally lead to higher customer satisfaction.

Revenue shows how much money you’ve made through your social channels.

This is a simple calculation of how much the average customer spends on a single purchase through your social commerce channels.

Like customer lifetime value, this helps you understand how much to spend on customer acquisition. However, this is a more short-term view of customer value that allows you to make on-the-fly decisions about budget allocation in social commerce campaigns.

Understanding your costs is important, but even more important is understanding the return you get on the money you pay for social ads and your social marketing strategy in general.

Each brand will define “value” differently. You might specifically mean income from sales tied to your social strategy, but you could also want to assign value to brand awareness or growing your social following.

As we mentioned up at the top, effective KPIs include clear targets based on the SMART methodology for setting realistic goals. This allows you to ensure that your KPIs are aligned with organizational needs and capabilities. Let’s look at a couple of KPI examples for social media.

Here’s you’ve got a clear metric (engagement rate), a specific platform (organic Instagram), a goal for the result (12% improvement), and a timeframe (Q3).

Since this KPI has a three-month timeframe (one quarter), you’ll likely want to check your progress biweekly or even weekly. You never want your KPI results to be a surprise—you need to check in regularly to see how you’re progressing and whether you need to adjust your strategy to get closer to achieving your goal.

Sometimes, rather than achieving a KPI within a set time, it makes sense to compare apples to apples by aiming for year-over-year changes. This allows you to account for regular ebbs and flows tied to busier periods like holidays and sales.

Since this is a year-over-year comparison, you’ll need a tool that allows you to pull data from the current period as well as the same period a year ago. You can then do a direct comparison. So, even though this is structured as an annual goal, you can check your progress by doing a y-o-y comparison at any time.

Now that you know what to measure, let’s look at how to track KPIs on social media.

Tracking KPI social media marketing progress natively—meaning, using the built-in analytics features of individual social media platforms—is one option. They’re free, easy to use, and can be a good option for social media managers who are only tracking KPIs for one or two social accounts.