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Planable is the best client-facing social media tool we've ever used and we've used a lot.
Ever found yourself drowning in comments, DMs, and mentions across every social platform your brand uses? You're trying to build relationships with customers, but managing conversations while keeping your content strategy on track feels impossible. Traditional CRMs...
Aug 21, 2025
Watching metrics like a hawk speeds up your decision-making process. Getting a good handle on social media metrics means illuminating audience behavior and preferences. You measure the impact of each new iteration of a social strategy but also make data-driven decisions every time you tweak an ongoing campaign or make space for a new content format.
This becomes even more valuable when you manage multiple social media accounts across different platforms and audiences. By comparing performance data across all your accounts, you’ll get valuable insights into which industry trends are relevant to digital marketing in general and which stay contained within a tiny niche.
Social media metrics are data points you can quantify. They show the impact of your social media efforts, from the performance of specific pieces of content to the efficiency of your overall strategy. Measuring key metrics reveals how much your target audience resonates.
To put in perspective how important social media metrics are for any brand with a presence on social platforms, I have to make one distinction.
Metrics and KPIs are both essential for social media measurement, but they serve different purposes in evaluating your strategy:
Social media marketing metrics help you evaluate the effectiveness of each social media campaign, understand audience engagement, and make fully informed strategic decisions.
Maybe you’re repurposing content and can see stats for the exact same video, posted at different times. If social media analytics tools like Planable spotlight only one of them as top-performing, you just discovered a peak posting time for your specific audience.
You can (and should) post multiple times within that window to test out this hypothesis.
Platform-specific analytics highlighting performance metrics like impressions, engagement rate, and top content cards.
With posting times locked down, you can cycle through formats and keep an eye on engagement metrics for, say, image tweets versus threads.
If you go for a Link in Bio tool, you can measure social media referral traffic to see if Instagram or TikTok is bringing in the highest ROI.
Each category plays a role in understanding social media performance. When you prioritize between all these metrics, a sharper vision for your business’s social media activity emerges.
Here are the categories of key metrics social teams should track:
These metrics reflect the influence of your brand positioning and how far or wide that snappy USP is able to reach. They measure the size of your social media audience (plus the extent of brand exposure) and are also known as reach metrics:
Do people truly vibe with your content? Social media engagement metrics tell you exactly how much they interact with each post and your social media accounts in general:
A good engagement rate is a crucial tool for growth, since each social action encourages the algorithm to push your content further.
Conversion metrics show how well your social media efforts influence audiences to take action. Whether it’s making a purchase, getting a quote, or grabbing an ebook, you’ll know exactly which campaigns and tactics deserve to become internal benchmarks.
Conversion metrics to keep on your radar:
This last one is essential among paid social media metrics. Compelling content and good media planning lead to a lower CPC, which keeps ad spend lower, too.
You improve your conversion rate and this whole set of metrics in general when you’re clear about showing value, dazzle with a good discount, and go hard on the skillful CTAs.
This bunch measures how folks perceive your social media presence. You’ve also got customer service metrics that specifically reflect the quality of customer care.
You could have the most innovative social media advertising concept this side of Spotify Wrapped. Once it’s done its job, the key to boosting customer service metrics is to treat people with respect, whether audiences or customer-facing team members.
A well-resourced team with folks who are consistently valued will provide a smooth experience for fans and future fans. Be generous in the face of constructive feedback and prioritize FAQs.
Here’s a step-by-step guide for setting up a system to monitor and interpret social media metrics. As with most strategic endeavors, you should reverse-engineer an approach starting from business objectives.
One thing to aim for: not another single marketing campaign without clearly measured results. Beyond a mission and a savvy narrative, your brand universe is also made up of these little data points that can crystallize deeper qualitative insights about your specific social media audience.
Implementing this process contextualizes the brand metrics we discussed above and helps you prioritize them.
Just like KPIs, objectives should follow the SMART formula (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound). Social goals should be connected to larger marketing goals and business goals.
Awareness metrics are super important for young brands and those that have just started posting to a specific social media platform. A corporation with an established helpdesk department might have a strict set of customer service metrics, tracked for years, across multiple time zones.
With objectives in place, an analytics-minded social media manager would have a look at all the possible metrics that relate to it and pick 2 to 3 for the top of the list.
If you’re looking to drive website traffic, you know the drill: click-through rate, bounce rate, conversion rate. If you’ve just changed your positioning after a decade in the industry, look at video performance metrics for your hero content, the engagement rate for each social media ad, but also consider network-specific metrics tools, especially when audience segments are being redefined.
Most social media management platforms have analytics capabilities, just with different levels of granularity and ease of use. There’s also software created especially for social listening and monitoring.
Here are your main options organized by functionality:
Go for something from the first category if you’re a small agency or lonesome social media marketer who would rather plan, create, approve, and measure, all in one place. Pick from the second group if you’re a large organization that already has content production, community management, and publishing covered with different tools.
Also consider what’s already available for free, like the monitoring tools in Meta Business Suite.
This is the whole point! If you hold all that data to your ear like a shell and listen really carefully, I swear you can almost hear it sing.
Look out for patterns, insights, and top-performing content. Consider which of these nuggets are most relevant and should be included in reports. Sprinkle some of that interpreting magic on the data you gathered and make sure there’s human-driven logic to contextualize the numbers.
Share reports with all the relevant stakeholders and give all responsible team members their flowers. Establishing this sequence as a regular practice will highlight trends and increase confidence for every new decision.
No cycle of gathering and analyzing data is complete without putting key takeaways to work.
See how different formats stack up against the social media algorithms and consider whether each one is worth its budget. Recycle compelling posts, but also deconstruct them while looking out for hooks that keep audience metrics high across platforms.
Different sets of changes can be implemented at different intervals. You’ll want to do a general review/optimization cycle per month, but also look out for spikes in comment activity every day. A more thorough review process every 3-6 months could reshuffle goals as your company scales up.
Planable is a social media management tool built with collaboration at its core. It helps teams set up top-to-bottom social media workflows that are both effective and a delight to interact with. The same goes for Planable’s approach to analytics.
Marketers and agencies can easily monitor social media performance with these features. Each one informs data-driven decision-making and the constant optimization that makes for a strong social media strategy:
LinkedIn analytics panel showing rising audience numbers, impression gains, and engagement from video and post types.
Google Business analytics with call volume, booking rates, search types, and device-specific view data.
Beyond social media monitoring, Planable handles your content for all the important social media channels. This includes Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest, Threads, and Google My Business.
Everything goes through a unified marketing calendar that lets you organize social media posts through filters and custom views, but also drag-and-drop to reschedule.
Visual content planner displaying scheduled blogs, videos, and promotions across Facebook, Instagram, and newsletters.
I have a hunch the person reading might be the same person crafting a marketing campaign and two emails at the same time.
All the written content that lives outside social channels can be managed in Planable, too. The Universal Content feature handles blogs, newsletters, ads, press releases, and so on.
The Universal Content feature supports blog posts, newsletters, social media, ads, and press releases in one unified view.
Feedback also flows efficiently through real-time comments, annotations, and text suggestions.
Feedback flows efficiently through real-time comments, annotations, and text suggestions in the Universal Content feature.
I get where you’re coming from if you’re wary of the idea of “social media success” and all the pressure it comes with. Implementing follower growth measures or getting that conversion rate to budge is no small feat.
But a team that collaborates well and uses the right tool will ease so much of that pressure.
Tracking social media metrics is key to understanding and improving social media performance. It guides strategic planning, shapes the creative process, and clarifies your budget.
Metrics help you correlate audience demographics and psychographics with behavior, but also spotlight effective content. They’re the most efficient way to prove ROI.
Find your next batch of strategy-upgrading insights with Planable. You’ll enjoy the process, and getting started is free.
Irina is a freelance conceptual copywriter with an ethical edge and an advertising agency background. If she’s not rummaging for good synonyms, she’s probably watching a sitcom or listening to radio dramas with plucky amateur detectives. She loves collage, doing crosswords on paper and shazamming the birds outside her window.
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