Social Media Measurement Tools

Measurement is an essential part of any marketing effort and that includes social media marketing. As a business owner, you should know the return on the investment or “ROI” as you spend money on social media marketing. Understanding how to value and measure what you’re doing on social networks—and how others respond to what you’re doing—helps you make smarter decisions about where to allocate money and resources toward social media marketing.

To get to the right metrics, start by reviewing your overall business goals and why and how you are using social media. Be specific about what outcomes spell success for your company. Leverage free and fee-based tools to monitor, measure, and analyze the results of your social media marketing activities and campaigns.

Some typical social media metrics include:

• Audience and follower growth rates
• Click-through rates (CTR)
• Engagement
• Views, Impressions, and Reach
• Conversions
• Demographics and psychographics

If you’re on a budget, you can get some basic data using the free analytics tools offered by each social network, including:

Facebook Audience Insights –Insights include demographics, interests, and lifestyle which includes a breakdown by age, gender, top cities, and top countries. Use this tool to compare the performance of your business and content with similar businesses on Facebook. Sections of the tool include Overview, Plan, Results, Messaging, and Benchmarking.

Instagram Insights – Since Instagram is now owned by Meta, the parent company for Facebook, the insights are similar. You need to have a business or a creator account on Instagram to view insights. Through the insights, you can learn more about your Instagram account’s followers and performance, as well as audience’s engagement with specific posts, stories, reels and live videos. If you pay for ads, you can also access those metrics.

X Analytics – The X “report card” gives you high-level statistics. The Post Activity Dashboard or PAD shows you how many times people have seen, reposted, liked, and replied to each of your posts. For video metrics, they provide a Video Activity Dashboard (VAD). You can also access a conversion tracking feature and can receive weekly recaps on your followers and impressions.

Pinterest Analytics – You must have a Pinterest business account to gain access to Pinterest analytics dashboard to see organic, paid and earned engagement for all of your Pins. You can find out how Pinterest users interact with content they’ve saved from your account and learn which topics your audience is most interested in.

YouTube Analytics – Get an overview of channel views plus a graph showing daily and weekly views, watch time in hours, and new subscribers, as well as top content during a particular time period. You can get more in-depth content-specific such as views and referrers and audience-specific metrics such as geography and age. You can also explore what content viewers on your channel are also viewing to refine your video content.

TikTok Analytics – TikTok measurement tools help you track visitor actions and monitor and measure web and app conversions from your TikTok campaigns and activity. TikTok recommends getting additional metrics using third-party solutions such as HootSuite, Zoho Social, and SproutSocial.

Another layer of tracking can come from URL shorteners such as Bitly and QR code generators such as the ones offered by Bitly, Canva, and even Google. Other third-party apps that provide metrics include Tailwind and Later.

Be realistic about what social media can do for your company. Track the impact of your social media posting and campaigns and take advantage of all available measurement tools to help you get a clear and detailed picture of how well you are doing and where you can improve.