7 Social Media Engagement Metrics for Tracking Followers and Growing Community

By now, you’ve heard a great deal about social media engagement.

You know that it’s not all about getting a big following.

You know it’s about getting a big following of the right people.

You know that building an awesome, engaged community around your brand, product, or idea is key to tapping into existing markets—and creating new ones! And you know that social media is a great place to maintain relationships with your customers long after they’ve decided to pay you.

But how does that happen?

Or maybe a better way of putting that is, “How do I know it’s happening?”

A great place to start is by setting up some simple social media engagement metrics to track. Let’s look through a few key performance indicators that can help you stay on course to growing an engaged following.

By the way: If you’re starting small, I recommend checking out Kevan Lee’s excellent email course full of practical social media engagement strategies. You’ll find all kinds of ideas to help you grow these metrics (and more)!

7 social media engagement metrics for tracking your following

I’ve grouped these together into two bigger buckets. The first deals with the followers themselves. The second deals with interactions between you and your followers. Here’s what we’ll cover:

Audience size

1. Audience growth rate
2. New follower rate
3. Follower/following ratio

Audience engagement

1. Likes per post
2. Shares per post
3. Comments per post
4. Clicks per post

Heads-up: if you’re using Buffer for Business, you’re in for a treat! For many of these metrics, I’ll give you a quick look at how to use some of the advanced features to track your engagement over time.

Let’s dive in!

First, let’s look at audience size.

Social media analytics for tracking engagement

Let’s start with ways to measure how many people you’re engaging with. We’ll look at ways to track and grow the quality of that engagement afterward. This is where we take a look at how many people are listening to you.

1. Audience growth rate

This is an obvious one to keep an eye on, as you probably want your following to trend upward. BlogThis!