What are 3 Social Media Metrics Every Business Should Track?
Are you effective at targeting your customers with social media? Most businesses answer that question by checking their likes. Many companies use “likes” as their main way of judging the strength of their social media presence. Likes are easy to count, but they say almost nothing about who your audience is or why they stayed.
Social media profiles are simple to set up, but they can be a challenge to manage. It is difficult to keep your intended audience consistently interested and engaged in your content when popular platforms are saturated with similar posts from competitors. One way to ensure you are making your mark on social media is by tracking key metrics that cost the reader some effort. What are 3 social media metrics every business should track?
3 Social Media Metrics Every Business Should Track
While likes are a good start, there are many other metrics businesses should be tracking to get a holistic understanding of their audience’s interaction with their brand. To get the most out of your profiles, make sure you are monitoring the following on all relevant platforms.
- Stories show timely engagement with events
- Comments offer detailed feedback on brands’ posts
- Shares indicate which consumers endorse your brand
Keeping up with these metrics will give you a more nuanced perspective on audience engagement, which has the power to inform changes to your social media strategy.
Social Media Engagement Scorecard
The hardest part of tracking engagement is not deciding that it matters. It is knowing where each number lives and what it actually tells you. Use the scorecard below as a weekly worksheet. Record the figure, then write one sentence on what it changed about next week’s posts.
| Metric | Where to find it | What to record | What the number tells you | Review cadence |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Story views | Instagram Insights, Facebook Page Insights, Snapchat story view list | Total views per story, plus views on the final frame | How many followers stayed to the end. A steep drop between the first frame and the last means the opening is working and the content is not. | Within 24 hours, before the story expires |
| Story screenshots and saves | Snapchat story detail view, Instagram Insights saves | Screenshots or saves per story | Someone wanted to keep this. It is the strongest signal available on content that disappears. | Within 24 hours |
| Story interactions | Instagram Insights, poll and question sticker results | Replies, poll votes, sticker taps | Active participation rather than passive viewing. Poll response rate is the cleanest read on whether the audience is awake. | Within 24 hours |
| Highlight views | Instagram profile Highlights | Cumulative views per Highlight | Which archived story content keeps earning attention after the 24 hour window closes. | Monthly |
| Comments per post | Native post view on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn | Count, split into questions, complaints and compliments | Questions signal a gap in what you posted. Complaints are a service queue. Compliments are testimonial material. | Daily |
| Comment response time | Your own log or inbox timestamp | Hours between the comment posted and your reply | Whether comments are working as a customer service channel or as an unanswered complaint board. | Daily |
| Shares and reposts | Native post analytics, Instagram Insights shares, LinkedIn reposts, X reposts | Shares per post, and shares on call to action posts specifically | A share attaches a person’s name to your content. It is the strongest visible endorsement available and the rarest. | Weekly |
| Share rate | Shares divided by reach for that post | Percentage, tracked per post over time | Which topics and formats your audience is willing to put their own reputation behind. Compare post to post, not platform to platform. | Weekly |
| Format comparison | Your own log | Format of each post, such as video, picture, quiz or poll, against its comment and share counts | Which formats earn the engagement that takes effort. This is what tells you what to make next. | Monthly |
Stories Show Timely Engagement With Events
Social media stories expire roughly a day after you publish them, which is exactly what makes them a clean measurement window. Nobody engages with a story out of habit a week later. These metrics show which users are interested in following your brand’s day-to-day activities or special events, and they tell you within a single day. They also reward the discipline of writing social media posts with a clear purpose.
Snapchat Story
Snapchat popularized stories back in 2013, and they have become much more robust and widely used since. Snap’s own newsroom confirms the timing: Snapchat launched Stories in October 2013. Within Snapchat, users can view stories, which are customized photo and video content, that friends post. Users can also localize their content by attaching it to the Snap Map, where anyone browsing that region can see it. Snapchat is explicit that this is a deliberate choice rather than a default: Snaps submitted to Snap Map are public content, so treat a Snap Map submission as a publishing decision, not a private post.
Snapchat stories are an area of opportunity for businesses to measure engagement with customers, and the interface remains extremely popular with younger generations. The catch is that stories, unless personally saved, disappear from the platform. Snapchat documents the window as a default rather than a rule: most Stories are set to delete after 24 hours unless you change the settings. Even so, especially for timely event coverage, businesses can gauge engagement with a story based on its number of views since the time it was posted and the number of screenshots taken of the content.
One practical limit is worth knowing before you build a reporting habit on it. Snapchat states that you will see the names of up to 200 Snapchatters that viewed your Story, after which you get a count without additional names. For a business with real reach, that means the named viewer list stops being useful quickly and the totals become the metric that matters.
Instagram Story Building
While Snapchat provides a decent read on viewer engagement, Instagram and Facebook now offer similar story-building functionalities, and businesses can analyze interactions on those platforms as well. Innovating on top of Snapchat’s creation, these stories allow users to include interactive elements like music and polls with ease. Businesses can track engagement through the number of users who engaged with the interactive elements, which is a far better signal than a view because the viewer had to do something.
While stories across platforms typically disappear after a day, Instagram created a Highlight feature that encourages users to archive their content and display it prominently on the top of their profiles. Instagram announced the feature directly: you can group stories you have shared into highlights and feature them on your profile. Story highlights allow businesses to benefit from the real-time appeal of stories without sacrificing the future availability of the content, and they can continuously monitor these highlighted stories for updated engagement statistics.
Businesses should track how users interact with stories to understand what types of good content are popular, such as videos versus pictures, or quizzes versus plain frames. Since stories remain a core format across every major platform, it is important to get a good understanding of them now to ensure you are ahead of the game later. Social media stories offer businesses the opportunity to highlight time-sensitive events and incorporate special effects in their content.
Comments Offer Detailed Feedback on Brands’ Posts
Comments present a great opportunity to get direct customer feedback. Comments are a feature on almost every leading social media platform including Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and more. They are text-based reactions users can attach to any post. A user comments on a post when they want to verbalize a question or opinion about what was posted, which makes a comment the only engagement signal that arrives with its own explanation attached.
Tracking Comments
On social media, people speak their minds most candidly about your brand and your content. Because of that unique opportunity to collect qualitative feedback, businesses should track the comments they are receiving. Counting them is the easy half. The half that changes anything is sorting each comment into one of three buckets as it arrives: a question, a complaint, or a compliment.
Each bucket routes somewhere different. A question means your post left out something a reader needed, so fix the post or the page it points to. A complaint is a service ticket that happens to be public. A compliment is testimonial material you already have permission to have heard. Monitoring comments also makes it easier to provide timely responses to concerns, compliments, and questions. This acts as a form of customer service, and it shows consumers you care about them. That is why it is important to track comments when building a brand identity on social media.
Actively Commenting
Actively commenting in a helpful and timely manner will leave consumers with a positive image of your brand. The metric that governs this is not the comment count but the response time: the hours between a comment appearing and your reply landing. Track it the same way you would track a support queue, because that is what it is. These benefits are not possible if your company is not monitoring the comments on its posts. In addition to the unique textual feedback comments offer, they are particularly important because they allow for in-depth interactions between users and the brand.
Shares Indicate Which Consumers Endorse Your Brand
A “share” occurs when a user chooses to display found content on their own profile for their network to view. Rarer than other forms of engagement, sharing social media content means a user has strong feelings about the content. Companies should track their “shares” on business profiles because shared posts on social media are strong endorsements of the message, and it is an excellent way to attract customers online.
For businesses, this is particularly important to monitor, because the audience most likely to do it is also the audience living on these platforms. In a 2015 MarketingSherpa survey of 1,176 United States consumers, 95% of 18-34 year olds said they used social media, compared with 74% of people aged 55 to 64. Users will not share content they do not feel strongly about. People share posts to connect with a brand or individual and deliver quality content to their networks. The act of sharing attaches a user’s name to a brand’s content, and this creates arguably the strongest visible connection between companies and individuals possible on social media.
Record the share count, then record the share rate, which is shares divided by that post’s reach. The raw count rewards your biggest posts. The rate tells you which subject and which format your audience is willing to put their own name behind, and those are rarely the same posts. It is particularly useful to track your call to action posts this way, because it shows how successfully your content mobilized viewers rather than merely reached them.
An increase in shares, or reposts on X, formerly retweets on Twitter, indicates an increase in loyal followers who align themselves with your voice. Those sharing content trust your brand enough to spread your message to their entire social network. Measuring this engagement is essential to understanding how strongly your followers feel about your content.
Companies Should Start Monitoring a Diverse Set of Social Media Metrics
While likes and impressions are important, tracking several different forms of online interaction will give your brand a full understanding of your customer and your performance on social media. Using business analytics improves the customer experience. Stories, comments, and shares are three common features across many platforms, so they are a great place to start optimizing how you monitor your engagement analytics.
Start this week. Fill in one row of the scorecard for your last five posts, check story figures inside the 24 hour window, and answer every comment within a day. Then write down what you will post differently next week. If you want the tracking habit written into a repeatable process your team can follow without you, the social media strategy procedure gives you the documented version.
Frequently Asked Questions
How often should a business review its social media metrics?
Match the cadence to how long the content lives. Story figures must be read inside the 24 hour window before the story expires, comments should be reviewed daily because they are a service queue, shares and share rate work best as a weekly review, and format comparisons need a month of posts before the pattern is readable.
Where do you find story, comment and share counts on each platform?
Story and share figures live in each platform’s own analytics area: Instagram Insights, Facebook Page Insights, LinkedIn post analytics, and the Snapchat story view list. Comment counts are visible on the post itself on every platform. Menu names change often, so confirm the current label in the app rather than trusting an older guide.
What counts as a good share rate?
There is no cross-industry benchmark worth trusting, because reach is calculated differently on every platform. Build your own baseline instead. Take your last twenty posts on one platform, calculate shares divided by reach for each, and treat the median as your normal. Anything at double that median is a topic and format worth repeating.
Should you respond to every comment, including negative ones?
Respond to every comment that contains a question or a complaint, and respond in public so other readers see the answer. Move the conversation to a private channel only once you need account details. Deleting a complaint that is not abusive costs you more trust than the complaint did.
Do stories still matter if they disappear after 24 hours?
Yes, and the expiry is part of why. A short life means the engagement you measure is genuinely timely rather than accumulated. When a story earns unusually strong interaction, save it to an Instagram Highlight so the content keeps working after the window closes.
