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Social media metrics to track in 2027 (and why).

Social media has changed a lot in ten years, and so have the numbers worth watching. Here’s which metrics to track for each goal, why they matter and how to measure them.

By Becca Wheble13-minute read22nd October 2026

Yeah, yeah, you’ve seen this blog before: the best social media metrics to track (and why you should). But the fact is, social media is constantly changing and, because of that, so are the metrics we need to be focusing on.

If we rewind ten years to 2017 (scary, I know!), the metrics you tracked would have looked very different. TikTok as we know it didn’t exist yet (Musical.ly didn’t merge into it until August 2018 (opens in a new tab)), and short-form video was… well… nowhere near as dominant as it is now. Instagram had only just swapped its chronological feed for an algorithm (opens in a new tab), hashtags were king (you could add up to 30 to a post, and plenty of us did), and impressions and clicks were the go-to signs of how well your content was performing.

Fast forward ten years, and TikTok is well and truly a thing. Short-form video dominates every platform (cue Instagram testing Reels as the first thing you see when you open the app (opens in a new tab)), and Instagram now limits posts to five hashtags (opens in a new tab). Because of all this, the metrics we track have changed too. Views, watch time, saves and shares are now just as important as the oldies like reach, impressions, clicks and followers.

In 2017, we were watching:

Impressions, likes, clicks and hashtag reach

In 2027, we’re watching:

Views, watch time, shares, saves and search

So, we’ve broken down the social media metrics worth tracking for each goal, the ones we think will matter most in 2027 and how to actually measure them.

In short

  • A social media metric is any number that shows how your content is performing against your goals.
  • The right metrics depend on your objective, so start with the goal, not the dashboard.
  • Views, watch time, shares and saves matter more than ever, but reach and impressions aren’t dead.
  • Social content now shows up in Google and in AI answers, so search is becoming a social metric too.
  • Track consistently, compare like with like and always explain the “why” behind the numbers.

Sooo, what is a social media metric?

It’s all well and good me going on about the good old days but, as we’ve established, social media has changed a lot over the years. What we define as a ‘social media metric’, though, has stayed largely the same.

Put simply, a social media metric is any data point you can measure (opens in a new tab). Think views, reach, shares, link clicks or follower growth. They’re the numbers that show how your content, campaigns and overall social media presence are performing against your business goals.

You’ll often hear metrics and KPIs used interchangeably, but there’s a small difference:

  • A metric is any number you can measure, like views, saves or followers.
  • A KPI is a metric you’ve chosen because it tracks progress towards a goal.

So every KPI is a metric, but not every metric is a KPI. Your KPIs are the handful of numbers you benchmark against, and the rest give you the context around them.

Why do we track social media metrics?

As above, tracking social media metrics is important for benchmarking against your KPIs and goals. We’ll get into the specific metrics further down but, essentially, picking the right metric is all about your objective.

Pick the goal first, then the metric.

For example, if you’re a new business and no one knows about your brand yet, you might want to focus on metrics such as reach and impressions. Some people will tell you these are nothing but vanity metrics but, honestly, it depends on your end goal.

Reach and impressions are really important for a lot of our clients in the arts and culture sector, because they’re a good indicator of how many people have seen an event. When most of these events are free and unticketed, it can be hard to put tangible numbers against the eyeballs on them, and reach is a great way to do that. For Light Night Wigan 2025, that meant 287,217 people reached, which is a pretty powerful number to put in a funding report.

Another key metric might be post shares. Let’s say you’re a bespoke joiner, like our client Beaumont & Co. Your audience is most likely in the research stage, so if they’re sharing your content with the people they’re planning a project or home renovation with, you know you’re onto a winner. You’re part of those conversations, even if you can’t physically see them!

So, let’s break down the social media metrics to track for each goal.

1 Growing your audience

If your goal is to build a bigger community around your brand, these are the metrics to watch:

  • Follower growth
    Net new followers over a set period
  • Follower growth rate
    How quickly you’re growing compared with your size
  • Profile visits
    People checking you out after seeing a post
  • Follows per post
    The content that turns viewers into followers
  • Non-follower reach
    How much of your audience is new to you
  • Audience demographics
    Whether you’re growing with the right people

Followers aren’t the be-all and end-all they once were. Most of what people see in Reels and Explore now comes from accounts they don’t follow, as Instagram explains in its own ranking guide (opens in a new tab). But your followers are still your community, and they’re the people most likely to come back, comment and buy.

That’s why we’d always pair follower growth with non-follower reach. One tells you whether your community is growing, and the other tells you whether new people are discovering you.

It also helps to set a clear target. For Beaumont & Co, we set a target of 780 followers by the end of 2026, up from a benchmark of 600. They passed it in May.

How to work out your follower growth rate

Follower growth rate = (new followers ÷ followers at the start) × 100

So, if you started the month with 2,000 followers and gained 150, your growth rate is 7.5%. Tracking the rate rather than the raw number makes it much easier to compare months, platforms and accounts of different sizes.

Try this: Check what percentage of your views came from non-followers last month. If it’s going up, the platforms are recommending your content to new people.

2 Building brand awareness

Brand awareness is all about how many people are seeing your content, and how often. The key metrics here are:

  • Reach
    The number of unique accounts that saw your content
  • Views
    Every time your content was on screen, repeats included
  • Video views
    How many times your videos were played
  • Mentions and tags
    How often people talk about you
  • Share of voice
    Your mentions compared with your competitors’
  • Branded search
    People searching for you by name

If you’ve noticed impressions quietly disappearing from your Instagram and Facebook insights, you’re not imagining it. Meta has switched to views as its main metric (opens in a new tab), and views count every time your content appears on someone’s screen, including repeat views. So, don’t panic if your numbers look higher than they used to.

Reach is still the metric we’d lean on most for awareness, because it counts people rather than screens. If your views are much higher than your reach, that’s a good sign: people are coming back for seconds.

For events, awareness metrics can make or break a report. Light Night Wigan 2025 had 222.7% more views than the year before, which tells funders a lot more about the festival’s visibility than a follower count ever could.

Try this: Put reach and views side by side in your next report. If views are much higher on certain posts, people are watching them more than once, so make more like them.

3 Getting people engaged

Engagement is where the algorithm is listening. Instagram’s Adam Mosseri has said the top three ranking signals are watch time, likes and sends (opens in a new tab), and that sends (shares via DM) matter slightly more when your content reaches people who don’t follow you yet.

  • Engagement rate
    Engagements as a percentage of reach
  • Shares and sends
    People passing your content on
  • Saves
    Content worth coming back to
  • Comments
    The quality of the conversation, not just the count
  • Average watch time
    How long people stay
  • Skip rate
    How many swipe away in the first three seconds

Instagram has also added a retention chart to Reels and replaced view rate with skip rate (opens in a new tab): the percentage of views from people who skip your Reel in the first three seconds. If yours is high, your hook needs work. (Nobody wants to be skipped!)

Saves and shares are the ones we get most excited about. A like takes half a second, but saving or sharing a post means it was genuinely useful, funny or worth showing to someone else. We’ve written more about why engagement matters for search, too.

How to calculate your engagement rate

Engagement rate by reach = (likes + comments + shares + saves) ÷ reach × 100

We prefer using reach rather than followers, because it measures engagement from the people who actually saw your post. Want to skip the maths? Try our calculator.

Engagement rate calculator

Add up the likes, comments, shares and saves on a post, then pop in its reach.

–engagement rate by reach

So, what’s a ‘good’ engagement rate? It varies massively by platform and industry, but here’s where the latest benchmarks sit:

These benchmarks divide engagement by followers rather than reach, so they’ll look lower than your reach-based rate. Honestly, the best benchmark is always your own performance over time.

Try this: Sort last month’s posts by shares and saves instead of likes. The top few will tell you what your audience actually values.

4 Driving enquiries and ROI

This is the one most businesses (and finance teams!) care about: is social media actually bringing in customers? The metrics to track here are:

  • Link clicks and CTR
    How often people click through from your posts
  • Link-in-bio clicks
    How many profile visitors go further
  • Website sessions
    Visits from social, tracked in GA4
  • Conversions
    Enquiries, sign-ups, bookings or sales
  • DM enquiries
    Conversations that start on social
  • Cost per result
    What each lead or sale costs through ads

To get the website side of this right, add UTM parameters (opens in a new tab) to the links you share. They tell Google Analytics exactly which platform, campaign and post sent someone to your site, so you can see what happens next. We’ve covered the GA4 metrics worth tracking in more detail, too. And if you’re running paid social, keep a close eye on cost per result, so you know what each enquiry is actually costing you.

One thing to remember: social media won’t always get the credit it deserves. Someone might see your Reel, Google your business a week later and enquire through your website, or share your post in a group chat you’ll never see. That’s why we look at social as one of several touchpoints, rather than expecting it to close every sale on its own.

Try this: Add UTM parameters to your link in bio and your next three post links, then check what they did in GA4 at the end of the month.

5 Looking after your customers

Social media is customer service now, whether you planned it that way or not. People will message you about opening times, orders, tickets and complaints, and they expect a reply. In Sprout Social’s 2025 Index (opens in a new tab), 73% of consumers said they’d buy from a competitor if a brand doesn’t respond on social.

  • Response rate
    The share of messages and comments you reply to
  • Response time
    How long people wait for a reply
  • Sentiment
    Whether conversations about you are positive or negative
  • Resolution rate
    How many queries you actually sort out
  • Customer satisfaction
    What people say about the help they got
  • Reviews and recommendations
    What customers say about you publicly

These metrics often get forgotten in monthly reports, but they’re a brilliant way to show the value of community management. For events in particular, social becomes the front desk in the run-up, which is exactly what we saw with Light Night Wigan once tickets sold out.

Try this: Set a response-time target, like replying to every message within the same working day, and report on it each month.

What social media metrics will be key in 2027?

If we had to pick the metrics we think will matter most next year, whatever your goal, it would be these six:

  • Views
  • Watch time
  • Shares and sends
  • Saves
  • Search visibility
  • Conversions

Views. Now that Meta, TikTok and YouTube all lead with views, it’s the closest thing we have to a common currency across platforms.

Watch time. Short-form video isn’t going anywhere, and how long people stay is one of the strongest signals you’ll get.

Shares and sends. The best sign that your content is reaching new people, and one of Instagram’s top ranking signals.

Saves. Proof that people found your content genuinely useful.

Search visibility. On social platforms, on Google and in AI answers. If you only start tracking one new thing in 2027, make it this one.

Conversions. Because at some point, someone will ask what all those views actually did for the business!

And the oldies? Reach, followers and clicks aren’t going anywhere. They just work best alongside these, rather than on their own.

How to track social media metrics

You don’t need a fancy dashboard to get started (although they’re nice to have). Here’s where we pull our numbers from:

Native analytics. Meta Business Suite for Facebook and Instagram, TikTok Studio, LinkedIn page analytics and YouTube Studio. They’re free, and they’re where the platforms show their newest metrics first.

Google Analytics 4. For website visits, enquiries and sales from social, using UTM parameters on your links.

Google Search Console. For how your social content performs in Google Search.

A social media management or listening tool. Handy for pulling every platform into one report, and for tracking mentions, sentiment and share of voice.

A simple tracker. Honestly, a spreadsheet does the job. Our social media analytics tracker is a good place to start.

As for how often to check, we’d recommend something like this:

Weekly

A quick look at what’s performing, so you can react while it’s still relevant

Monthly

A proper report against your KPIs, with the “why” behind the numbers

Quarterly

A step back to review your strategy, goals and targets

Whatever you report on, compare like with like. For seasonal businesses and events, that might mean comparing this October with last October, rather than with September.

So, which social media metrics should you track?

The honest answer is: the ones that match your goals. Social media will keep changing (we’ll probably be writing the 2028 version of this blog this time next year!), and the metrics will keep evolving with it.

But if you start with what you’re trying to achieve, pick a handful of KPIs that reflect it and track them consistently, you’ll always have a clear picture of what’s working, and what to do next.

And if you’d like a hand making sense of your numbers, our social media audits look at what your metrics are really telling you, and give you a clear plan for what to do about it.

So, before you open your next report, don’t just ask “What went up?” Ask “What are we actually trying to achieve?”

Want a hand picking your KPIs?

Get in touch

FAQs: social media metrics to track.

What are the most important social media metrics to track?

It depends on your goal, but for most brands in 2027 we’d prioritise views, watch time, shares, saves, search visibility and conversions. Reach, followers and link clicks are still worth tracking alongside them.

What’s the difference between a social media metric and a KPI?

A metric is any number you can measure, like views or saves. A KPI is a metric you’ve chosen because it tracks progress towards a specific goal. Every KPI is a metric, but not every metric is a KPI.

Are reach and impressions vanity metrics?

Not if they’re tied to a goal. For brand awareness, and especially for free or unticketed events, reach is one of the best ways to show how many people have seen you. They only become vanity metrics when you track them without asking what they mean.

How do you calculate engagement rate?

Add up the likes, comments, shares and saves on a post, divide by its reach and multiply by 100. Some benchmark reports divide by followers instead, so check which method you’re comparing against.

What is a good engagement rate on social media?

It varies by platform and industry. Quid’s 2026 benchmark report (opens in a new tab) (formerly Rival IQ) puts the median engagement rate per post at 2.01% on TikTok and 0.30% on Instagram, calculated against followers. The most useful benchmark is your own performance over time.

What’s the difference between reach, impressions and views?

Reach is the number of unique people who saw your content. Impressions and views count every time it appeared on screen, including repeat views. Meta now uses views instead of impressions on Instagram and Facebook.

How often should you report on social media metrics?

We’d recommend a quick weekly check, a full monthly report against your KPIs and a quarterly review of your strategy and targets.

How can you measure social media’s impact on AI search?

Use Google Search Console to see how your social content performs in Google Search, check GA4 for referral visits from AI tools like ChatGPT, and regularly ask AI tools the questions your customers ask to see whether your brand is mentioned or cited.

Becca Wheble, founder of Silly Goose Digital

Written by Becca Wheble

Becca is the founder of Silly Goose Digital. She’s worked in social media marketing since 2018, across B2C and B2B brands, and now specialises in arts festivals and cultural events. More about Becca

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