30 Key Small Business Social Media Metrics Defined

As mentioned in our Ultimate Guide to Social Media Analytics for Small Businesses, it’s critical to identify and understand the metrics that matter to your specific business goals. There is a long list of data points that you can consider—ranging from impressions, conversions, likes, or clicks to your website. Even though each of these metrics can be insightful, they may not all be relevant to you. It’s critical to understand the role of each metric and how it relates to your goals.

To help you make this decision, we’ve identified and defined the 30 most popular and important social media metrics.

Facebook Fan Page Metrics

Facebook provides its Audience Dashboard, which is a powerful tool that allows all admins to track interaction and activity on their Facebook page. It provides users with the following key statistics:

1. Admin Posts: Posts status updates from admin users.
2. People Talking About This: The number of “unique people” who have created a story about your page.
3. Stories Created: Each time your page was seen in a news feed. Stories can be created from user mentions, likes, posts, event RSVPs, or admin posts.
4. User Mentions: The number of times a user tags your page in their post. This is when someone can see the link directly to your page from the post or comment.
5. Total Reach: The number of people who could have seen a story about your page. This is counted for each person who loads the story about your page while browsing Facebook.
6. Total Impressions: The number of people who could have seen a story about your page (reach) + the number of times (frequency) the post was shown.
7. Consumers: People who interacted with your page but did not create a story. Some examples are watching a video on your page or looking at a picture but not liking, commenting on, or sharing it.
8. Page Mentions: The number of times users tag your page in posts allowing their friends to link directly to your page from the post or comment.
9. Organic Reach: The number of unique people who saw your content in the news feed, ticker, or on your page during the selected time frame. This includes people who have liked your page and people who haven’t.
10. Page Likes: The total page likes for each day, over a 28-day period.
11. Viral Reach: The number of unique people who saw a story about this page published from a friend in the report time frame. These stories include liking your page, posting to your page’s wall, commenting on or sharing one of your page’s posts, and taking other actions relating to your page that their friends could see.

Twitter Account Metrics

The Twitter Analytics Dashboard gives you a 28-day overview of your Twitter activity and performance. It gives you a wide range of data, including the following:

12. Followers: Users who have subscribed to your Twitter updates and will see your Tweets show up in their news stream.
13. Tweets: Messages you send out to your followers.
14. Mentions: Mentions are defined by the @handle being in the body of a user Tweet, but not necessarily at its beginning.
15. Replies: Replies are mentions that start with the @handle of a specific user you’re engaging.
16. Retweets: A retweet is when a user shares a post of another user with their followers. Twitter enables this action with the “retweet” button.
17. Potential Impressions: The total number of times a Tweet from your account or a Tweet mentioning your account will appear in someone’s Twitter feed during the report period (does not imply that a user viewed their Twitter feed during that time).
18. Potential Reach: The sum of all the followers of all unique people.
19. Engagement per Tweet: The total number of replies and retweets to one of your tweets.
20. Total Engagement: The number of times your Twitter account was mentioned during the report period.

Instagram Account Reports

About a year ago, Instagram introduced its own dashboard, which allows users to understand how their photos and videos are performing beyond total likes and views. With Instagram’s dashboard, you can track:

21. Likes: Similarly to Facebook, users on Instagram can “like” a photo to express interest.
22. Total Engagement: The total number of likes and comments on a posted photo.
23. Filters: The filter with the highest engagement per photo.
24. Best Time for Engagement: The time of day with the highest comment frequency during the report time period.

LinkedIn Dashboard

LinkedIn collects a large amount of data regarding your business profile, and through its dashboard, you can see a breakdown of posts, engagement, and network growth. Here are the top metrics that you can measure with the LinkedIn tool:

25. Page Views: How many times your page was viewed.
26. Unique visitors: How many LinkedIn member visited your page. Like page views, but it removes duplicate visits, so you can see how many Unique Visitors looked at your page.
27. Impressions: The number of times your updates were shown to LinkedIn members.
28. Clicks: The number of clicks on your content, company name, or logo. This doesn’t include interactions (shares, likes or comments).
29. Followers Acquired: How many followers that you gain through your company page updates.
30. Social Engagement Percentage: The number of interactions plus the number of clicks and followers acquired, divided by the number of impressions.

Remember, you do not need to track all of these metrics. Take some time to review the metrics above to define which few metrics make the most sense for you. This will help you avoid over analyzing and gain the insight necessary to optimize your social media performance.