Social Media Reporting: 15 Social Media Metrics To Help You Prove ROI

- Let’s post more product promotion posts on LinkedIn with tons of hashtags to help drive sales and visibility

- But boss, from our social media marketing analytics, these posts don’t do well. We should instead post more educational stuff that adds value and gets people interested in our brand. These social media efforts actually resulted in a couple of sales.

- Hm, do we have data to support this?

- Well, according to these key metrics …

—

If this situation sounds familiar, you’re not alone.

We’re here to help track social media metrics to inform your content strategy, support your marketing campaigns and present your KPIs professionally using social media analytics tools like DashThis.

Why marketers should track social media metrics
The 15 most important social media metrics to track - categorized by objective
How to interpret social media metrics - a 3-step guide
Social media metrics report template

Why marketers should track social media metrics

You'll know what your audience wants on each social media platform

More than half the world uses social media. Maintaining a presence on social media is one way to get your brand in front of an engaged audience looking for education, entertainment, and inspiration.

What people look for on different social media platforms and tips for how brands should show up on various social media platforms. Source: GWI Global Social Media Trends Report 2023

Social media becomes essential when aiming to reach millennials and Gen Z. Research from GWI shows 47% of this target group primarily use social media to research their purchases and discover new brands. Tracking social media engagement metrics like shares, comments, and reach while monitoring the emotional sentiment on your social media content helps us know what content contributes to your goals and what isn’t.

It can help you select the social media platforms that are right for your company

New social media apps pop up all the time.

In July 2023 alone:

Meta’s Threads launched and hit 100 million sign-ups in 5 days
Twitter rebranded itself to X
TikTok introduced text posts.

It's tempting for marketers to jump on the bandwagon of new apps with every new social platform and social media algorithm change.

But remember, you don’t have to be on every social media platform to be successful.

Evaluate your target audience demographics and if they’re active on a new platform first. Look at how many social media accounts you can manage at once, then decide whether investing time and energy in showing up on a social media platform is worth it.

Measuring the right metrics helps you get buy-in from clients

Social media data is a valuable source of information for business strategy. Source: Sprout Social, The State of Social Media 2023

Social media isn’t limited to marketing. It’s also a valuable channel for customer care, competitor analysis, PR, and brand awareness and plays a crucial role in driving company strategy and customer satisfaction.

Hence, executives and clients will scrutinize your social media campaign proposals and results even closer now.

Getting clear on how your brand is performing on social media, identifying metrics to track, and presenting metrics in an easily understandable way is even more critical now if you want to get buy-in and confidence in the social media strategies you deliver to your clients.

The 15 most important social media metrics to track - categorized by objective

Which social media KPIs should you monitor?

Here’s a list to get you started.

Brand awareness metrics: Measures the number of people who see and talk about your brand

Number of impressions: How often is your content shown to people?

Reach: Are people looking at your content?
Share of voice: How visible is your campaign or brand against your competitors?
Brand mentions: How often do people mention your brand on social media?
Follower growth and audience growth rate: How many new followers are you getting over time?

Engagement metrics: Measures your content’s quality

Social shares: How often does your audience share or retweet your social media posts
Saves: The number of times people save your content to revisit for another time
Reactions and comments: Did your content spark a question or conversation?
Click-through rate (CTR) and number of clicks: How much referral traffic to your blog, landing pages, and offers are from your social media content?
Overall engagement rate: A useful aggregate metric to ensure your content remains engaging as your number of followers grows

Revenue metrics: Show social media’s contributions to the business bottom line

Note: Some of these marketing metrics will need data from Google Analytics 4 to populate. If you’re new to GA4, check out our GA4 reporting guide and GA4 migration walkthrough

Conversions: Did your content push people along a conversion or create a conversion? Use the conversions path report in GA4 to track assisted conversions from social media and show it on your report as a widget
Revenue from social media: How many sign-ups come from social media content?
Website visits from social media: How much website traffic or landing page traffic come from social media?

Strategic metrics: To inform social media strategy

Top posts: Analyze your top posts to find out why they’re successful and what you can takeaway for next week’s or next month’s strategy

Sentiment analysis of social media comments: Most metrics we’ve listed here are quantitative. It’s worth looking at the overall sentiment of your social media comments to see if you’re receiving positive or negative feedback on a post

How to interpret social media metrics - a 3-step guide

Once you’ve got the data, here’s how to turn this data into actionable insights for your clients.

Step 1: Determine your social media goals

Before interpreting your data, have a plan in mind. Why are you on this social media channel?

Consider how growing a social media presence on this channel contributes to your business’s goals. Having defined plans helps focus your efforts and how you put together your social media reports.

Some social media goals and example KPIs:

Building a community around your business by growing an engaged following and prioritizing interactions
Driving engaged traffic to your website or blog by monitoring overall quality (bounce rate from social media) and quantity (traffic by social media channel)
Generate new leads for your business by sharing gated content and monitoring the quality of leads from social media
Grow brand awareness by monitoring brand mentions, content reach and shares

Read more:

100+ KPI examples if you need more ideas.

How to write a SMART business goal

Step 2: Get all your social media data into one place for easy analysis

While you can manually export data from each social media platform for reporting, the time taken exporting and formatting data for reporting adds up fast.

Let’s say your client is active on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn, and you take 10 minutes to export and format the raw data from each platform.

That’s 30 minutes spent on manual work per client.

So if you manage five accounts, that’s 2.5 hours of manual work. And this is before analysis too.

You see where this is going.

Skip the late nights in the office and stressful afternoons. Here’s how to use reporting tools like DashThis and save you hours per day on manual reporting.

First, sign up for your free 15-day trial

Once done, create your social media dashboard and give it a name in DashThis

Add your data sources

Our templates automatically suggest suitable integrations. All you need to do is to connect your social media accounts, and we’ll populate the report based on your data.

Finally, customize your metrics and headers to fit your needs

Save the report when you’re done to reuse it for future reports

Step 3: Look out for patterns and trends in performance to analyze

When interpreting data, pay attention to information that does not fit the pattern.

For example, let’s say you’re reporting on the number of engaged users on Facebook and spot a significant dip between months. Here’s an opportunity for further analysis. Remember to provide a recommendation for the next steps as well.

Data: We spotted an 80% dip in engaged users between March and April

Analysis: Our boosted post campaign, which had significant engagement, ended last month. That funny meme giving a humorous spin on recent industry news did exceptionally well.

Recommendation: Make trend jacking a bigger part of our social media strategy by investing in social listening and staying up to date on trends

Tip: Use DashThis’s in-built notes and comments feature to include this analysis in your social media report for your client.

Social media metrics report template

Track your social media metrics with your own data!

Take advantage of DashThis’s 40+ integrations, including integrations with popular social media platforms like LinkedIn, TikTok, and more, to quickly get all your social media performance data into one report.

Social media managers handle lots of data, and our fully customizable report gives you a starting point to create a report to show social media ROI (return on investment) and get support for your work.

Features of the social media metric report template:

Sections for all major social media platforms, separated into segments and headers to easily present ongoing social media campaign results to your client
Quickly identify top performing social posts to inform your strategy for next week or month
Includes widely used social media KPIs to give you a solid base while constructing your report

Automate your social media metrics reporting

Today, social media platforms are essential to a company's branding, outreach, lead generation, and sales efforts.

Measuring the right metrics and presenting them in an easy-to-follow report makes it easier to position your social media campaigns as worthwhile investments. Simplify your social media reporting process with DashThis and save hours each week so you can focus on developing digital marketing strategies.

Sign up for your free 15-day trial of DashThis today.