Updated: January 3, 2025
If your B2B organization invests in social media marketing, you need to be using key performance metrics (KPIs). They shine a light on performance, so you can clearly identify the campaigns that drive engagement and the ones that just don’t connect with your audience. They inform your social strategies and campaign decisions and can even help you determine which social channels are best for your brand.
Many social marketers use engagement, reach and click-through rate (CTR) to gauge their performance. But these metrics aren’t KPIs. Instead, they’re data points that feed into broader KPIs that measure the success of specific goals such as building brand awareness or improving conversion rates.
In this article, we’ll look at the differences between metrics and KPIs and identify some of the KPIs you might include in your social media strategy, along with the metrics that support them.
The Difference Between Social Media Metrics and KPIs
Although we tend to use the terms interchangeably, metrics and KPIs aren’t the same thing. Metrics are individual data points or measurements of social media activity, such as clicks, likes, comments and shares. KPIs are a collection of metrics that are used to assess the effectiveness of a social media strategy in achieving specific marketing goals or business objectives, such as lead generation, conversion or revenue growth.
Social media metrics are indicators of specific interactions or behaviors on social platforms, such as clicks, likes, comments and shares.
Social media KPIs are a collection of metrics with a mission, identifying the impact of efforts in achieving specific goals.
The critical difference between KPIs and metrics becomes clear when you consider the extent of their usefulness. Tracking metrics alone may provide performance insights, but without the context of specific goals addressed with KPIs, those insights aren’t meaningful or actionable for optimizing your social marketing efforts.
Common Social Media Metrics That Contribute to KPIs
Before we discuss the KPIs B2B digital marketers use to measure social media success, let’s review a few of the most common social media metrics that contribute to KPI tracking and the misunderstandings around them.
Reach, Impressions and Frequency
Reach, the total number of unique people who have seen a specific post or ad, indicates the size of the audience for a particular piece of content. Tracking reach helps you understand the actual size of your potential audience and determine whether to adjust your campaigns for a wider or a narrower, more targeted audience.
Impressions, often confused with reach, indicate the total number of times a post or ad was shown, regardless of whether the same people saw it multiple times. Tracking impressions helps you understand how often your audience is exposed to your content.
Frequency, calculated by dividing impressions by reach, is the average number of times a social ad was shown to each person. Frequency can be limited or capped in your paid social campaigns to avoid ad fatigue.
Follower Growth
Tracking followers (page likes, subscribers) can help you understand how quickly your social media following is growing and identify trends impacting growth. However, it’s also important to consider the quality of your following – whether followers are in your target audience or interested in your content – by weighing your follower growth against your engagement metrics.
Likes vs. Engagement
Likes are one of the most basic engagement metrics. However, the don’t tell the full story. While likes might suggest that people find a post interesting, they don’t indicate a genuine interest in your brand. For example, someone might like a post that they find entertaining or insightful without having any intention to engage further.
Relying on likes as an engagement metric can skew the picture because they can come from outside your target audience. A post with a high number of likes might lead you to overestimate its effectiveness, even though it might not be reaching people most likely to buy from you.
Other types of engagement, such as comments, shares and clicks, are typically more meaningful, because they indicate how well the content resonates with your audience. With this understanding, you can adjust to your audience’s preferences. Additionally, engagement metrics are more relevant (than likes) to specific marketing goals, such as driving traffic to a website or increasing sales.
Click Through Rate (CTR)
CTR, the percentage of people who click on your post or ad, measures the effectiveness of your content in driving traffic. However, there are several misconceptions about the meaning and value of the CTR metric.
CTR is often believed to indicate campaign success, but CTR alone doesn’t provide enough to understand audience behavior. People may click out of curiosity or a surface level interest rather than deep engagement or intent. Nor does CTR necessarily indicate content performance. Clicks can be driven by catchy headlines or attractive visuals, even if the content doesn’t align with the audience’s needs. Clicks aren’t indicative of conversions, either.
It’s important to balance CTR with other metrics to get a more complete picture of campaign performance and audience behavior.
Cost Per Click (CPC) and Cost Per View (CPV)
CPC and CPV measure the cost of each click or view on an ad. CPC refers to text or image ads, while CPV refers to video ads. These metrics help you monitor advertising costs and maximize your return on investment (ROI). While a low CPC or CPV can indicate efficient ad spend, it doesn’t necessarily signify a successful campaign.
Low CPC/CPV can happen if your targeting is too broad, resulting in low-quality clicks that don’t translate into meaningful engagement. Likewise, low CPC/CPV doesn’t necessarily drive awareness by maximizing visibility because it isn’t indicative of a memorable experience.
For a better understanding of a social campaign’s success, CPC and CPV should be evaluated alongside conversion, engagement and post-click or post-view metrics.
Choosing KPIs Based on Your Business and Marketing Goals
Which social media KPIs you need to track depends on your business and marketing initiatives. Every KPI relies on a set of metrics that can differ across platforms, industries and even audiences. For example, if your goal is to drive web traffic, you might use click-through rates (CTR) and link clicks. But if you’re focused building community engagement, you might use engagement and follower growth. Industry norms and platform-specific metrics — such as saves on Instagram or impressions on LinkedIn — can also impact the KPIs most relevant to your brand.
As you’ll see, many of the following KPI examples include some of the common metrics defined above, in addition to other, more specific metrics.
Brand Awareness Growth KPI
Tracking brand awareness supports goals such as expanding market reach, building loyalty, driving top-of-funnel leads and building long-term brand equity. Key metrics for this KPI typically include:
- Impressions and reach
- Engagement rate
- Follower growth rate
- Brand mentions measures the level of conversation surrounding your brand by tracking the number of times your brand name is mentioned on social media.
- Social share of voice (SOV) measures the percentage of discussions about your brand in comparison to your competitors, helping you understand your share of the overall conversations as well as your competitive standing.
Conversion Rate KPI
Tracking conversions supports goals such as lead generation, new customer acquisition, boosting sales and maximizing return on marketing investment. While it might seem like conversion rate is the only metric you need to track for the conversion KPI, to get a full picture of conversion effectiveness, you need a broader set of metrics, including:
- Conversion rate measures the effectiveness of your campaign in driving conversions by tracking the percentage of people who took a desired action, such as making a purchase or filling out a form.
- Video view rate measures audience interest in your video ad by tracking the percentage of views compared to impressions.
- Cost per conversion measures campaign efficiency by tracking the amount your brand spends on social media advertising to generate one conversion.
- Return on ad spend (ROAS) measures campaign profitability by tracking the amount of revenue your brand generates from an ad compared to the amount spent on it.
- Revenue generated helps you understand how effectively social media efforts contribute to business revenue by tracking the overall ROI of your social marketing activities.
- Average order value (AOV) measures a campaign’s effectiveness in driving high- or low-value conversions by tracking the average amount spent on each order made through social media channels.
Customer Retention Rate KPI
Tracking customer retention supports goals such as building brand loyalty, reducing customer acquisition costs and increasing long-term revenue. Metrics supporting this KPI include:
- Engagement rate
- Follower growth rate
- Customer lifetime value (CLV) measures customer loyalty by tracking the total revenue a customer is expected to generate for the brand over their lifetime.
- Repeat purchase rate tracks how many customers make multiple purchases from your brand, helping you understand customer loyalty and retention.
- Net promoter score (NPS) measures customer loyalty and engagement by tracking how likely customers are to recommend the brand to others.
Customer Service Effectiveness KPI
Social media has become a critical channel for customer service, providing an opportunity for B2B brands to enhance the customer experience by addressing concerns and inquiries in real time. The metrics supporting this KPI include:
- Response time tracks how quickly your brand responds to questions or complaints on social media, which can influence customer satisfaction.
- Resolution rate measures how effective your brand is at addressing customer concerns and providing a positive experience by tracking the percentage of customer inquiries or complaints that are resolved on social media.
- Sentiment analysisassesses the tone of customer interactions to help your brand gauge customer satisfaction.
- Customer feedback, including complaints, suggestions and praise, helps you identify areas to improve your customer service and engagement strategies on social media.
Influencer Marketing Effectiveness KPI
As influencer marketing grows in the B2B space, it’s important to know how well your efforts support goals such as building brand credibility, educating the market, boosting leads and shortening the sales cycle. Key metrics for evaluating influencer marketing success include:
- Influencer ROI measures the effectiveness of your influencer campaign in driving revenue by tracking the financial return relative to campaign costs.
- Influencer conversion rate measures how effectively an influencer drives desired actions for your brand by tracking the percentage of their audience that completes a specific action, such as signing up, making a purchase or filling out a form
- Influencer engagement rate measures how interested an influencer’s audience is in your brand by tracking the level of engagement their content generates when promoting your brand.
- Influencer reach helps you understand the size of an influencer’s audience by tracking number of people who see their content, which can impact your brand’s exposure and engagement.
- Brand affinity helps you understand how closely an influencer’s audience relates to your brand by measuring alignment between the influencer’s content and your brand’s values and messaging.
- Cost per engagement (CPE) measures the cost of each engagement generated by the influencer’s content, calculated by dividing the total campaign cost by the total number of engagements.
Overall Social Media Effectiveness KPI
Beyond tracking specific KPIs aligned with your individual goals, there are several other key metrics that can help you evaluate the overall effectiveness of your brand’s organic and paid social media content. These metrics typically include:
- Engagement Rate
- Follower growth
- CTR
- CPC
- Video view count measures the overall reach of a video by tracking the number of times a video has been viewed by users.
- Video watch time or duration measures how engaging video content is by tracking how long users watch a video before they stop or exit the video.
- Video completion rate indicates how successful a video is at capturing your audience’s attention and keeping them engaged by tracking the percentage of users who watch to the end.
- Top-performing content helps you understand what type of content to create more of by tracking which types of content resonate most with your target audience.
- Referral traffic indicates the channels or campaigns that drive the most traffic by tracking the number of visitors a website, app, landing page or even another social channel receives from a social channel or campaign.
- ROI helps you understand the effectiveness of your efforts by calculating your profits against your total social media marketing spend.
Tools to Track Social Media KPIs
Social media marketing analytics tools – such as Hootsuite Insights, Sprout Social, Brandwatch and HubSpot – make it easier to measure and analyze social media KPIs. These tools aggregate data from multiple social media platforms, giving you a single, more complete view of your performance. For example, while Facebook provides basic information on engagement rate and reach, analytics tools can get more granular, helping you understand the type of engagement, the time of day the engagement occurred and the demographics of the engaged audience. Social media marketing analytics tools also provide more advanced metrics that are not available on social media platforms, such as sentiment analysis and brand mentions.
Add Tracking Codes to Your Website
To get the full view of social media KPIs, you must add social media tracking to your website (apps, landing pages, etc.). Each channel has its own tracking mechanism, so it’s important to follow the specific instructions provided by each platform to ensure accurate tracking.
For Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter, you would add the following tracking codes to your website:
- Facebook Pixel – for Facebook and Instagram tracking
- LinkedIn Tag
- Twitter Ads Tag
Tracking for YouTube is a bit different. To measure the impact of YouTube ads on web traffic and conversions requires Google Ads Conversion Tracking. You must create a conversion action in Google Ads, and then add the tracking code to your website using Google Tag Manager or manually in the header of your website.
Marketing automation tools use their own tracking pixels to provide more detailed insights into the performance of social media and other digital marketing efforts.
Monitor KPIs and Adjust Accordingly
KPIs provide more than just a snapshot of your social media performance. By shining a light on what’s working and what’s not, KPIs are indicators that guide improvement. For this reason, it’s necessary to continuously track and analyze your KPIs. Doing so enables you to quickly adjust your approach for better reach, engagements and conversions.
Drive Social Marketing Success
With over 25 years of expertise in B2B marketing, Elevation Marketing can help you navigate the complexities of identifying and tracking your social media KPIs. Our tailored approach ensures your social marketing efforts are fueled by insights that enhance your success.
Contact us to see how we can help you drive measurable results.
