Some of the the most common and often important metrics to pay attention to are engagement, impressions and reach, share of voice, referrals and conversions and response rate and time. You can find details below on some top benchmarks, metrics, and trends.

  1. Know what sites to focus on – What’s the current traffic from Twitter like now compared to when we started the campaign? And is that reach bigger or smaller than the increased traffic from Facebook? The answers would inform where to focus efforts going forward.
  2. Know what to talk about – When a brand starts talking about a new product, how does that conversation impact brand page-views, subscribers, and click-throughs? 
  3. Know how to talk about it – In some cases, like with personal stories, video might generate more lively discussions than text. On the other hand, text might work better if we’re looking to share research. 
  4. Know the best time – How does the working strategy align with the best days to tweet or FB about a brand product or event? 
  5. Engagement – Likes, comments, shares, and clicks. The engagement rate is a metric often used to track how actively involved with your content your audience is and how effective your brand campaigns are. Engaged consumers interact with brands through interactions such as “likes,” comments and social sharing.
  6. Engagement duration – For some brands, engagement duration is more important than page views. For example, if a brand has a Facebook application, how much time are social network members spending using it? Is per-member usage increasing over time? Alternately, if people visit the a brand website from social media (SM) sites, how long are they spending? (track which pages they visit). 
  7. Awareness: Impressions and Reach – Impressions are how many times a post shows up in someone’s timeline. Reach is the potential unique viewers a post could have (usually a brand’s follower count plus accounts that shared the post’s follower counts).
  8. Share of voice: Volume and sentiment – Share of voice is a metric often used in public relations, or as part of a competitive analysis or paid advertising campaign. It indicates how much of the online sphere your brand is taking part in. For example, if you’re a bank in California, it would look like how many people are talking about a brand online as compared to its competitors.
  9. Activity ratio – How active is your brands collective social network? Best practices are to always compare the ratio of active members vs. total members (sales vs. total sales), and chart this over time. 
  10. Conversions – We want social network members to convert into new customers. We measure all types of conversions and chart them over time. 
  11. Brand mentions in social media – A brand may a highly active social network and members are talking about that brand. It is important to measure and track both positive and negative sentiment, and their quantities. 
  12. Loyalty – Are social members interacting in the network repeatedly, sharing content and links, mentioning a brand? How many members re-post? How often do they re-post?
  13. Contribution level – Social members might be sharing Twitter tweets and Facebook updates relevant to a brand, but is this info being re-posted by their networks? How soon afterwards are they re-posting? How many Friends of Friends are re-posting a brand’s links and content?
  14. Membership increase and active network size – Do a brands social networks (e.g., Twitter, LinkedIn) that actively engage with their social media content (e.g., blogs, video’s, etc.) Are their collective members, followers, fans or networks growing? Is there interaction with our content? 
  15. Blog interaction – This is actually more than one metric lumped together. Blogs are part of an SMM (Social Media Marketing) toolkit, but only if a brand allows comments and interact with readers by responding). 
  16. Social Media Trends – Be sure and check out some of the top social media trends that brands may want to investigate to see what is the right fit for them to increase engagement.