9 key social media listening metrics every marketer needs to know in 2024

Social media can sometimes feel like the wild west.

Brands know they should post content on social media. But without the right metrics, it’s hard to understand if these efforts are moving the needle and helping them reach their target audience.

Social metrics such as comments and likes provide a basic look at whether a post resonates with an audience. However, using social media listening metrics can help you understand what content your audience wants and how they feel about your brand on a deeper level.

These metrics provide valuable insights into what consumers are saying about your brand, how you measure up against competitors‌ and what trends are driving engagement in your industry.

In this post, we’ll explore which metrics can be used to listen to different parts of a social media campaign to drive results. Also, learn how to use listening metrics to edge out the competition‌ and improve your social media strategy.

Why should you track social media listening metrics?

Social media listening metrics, like volume of brand mentions and sentiment score, help you understand who’s talking about your brand and products online, what they’re saying and how they feel.

Tracking social media listening metrics isn’t just useful—it’s essential. These metrics are an important part of any marketing strategy as they tell you about people’s emotions about a brand. Monitoring audience sentiment toward your brand can help you understand your audience, identify trends and respond to customer needs effectively.

You can also apply the learnings from these metrics to other parts of a business, like customer service or social media strategies, to align messaging with your target audience.

9 key social media listening metrics to track

Social media listening metrics are key to understanding how your brand is perceived, how your campaigns are performing‌ and what opportunities exist for improvement.

However, there are different social media listening metrics to use across your strategy. Some metrics track brand and sentiment, while others track engagement and campaign performance.

Here are nine key social media listening metrics every strategy should use.

1. Brand mentions

Tracking how often your brand is mentioned on social media is a way to gauge brand awareness and reputation. On a basic level, this metric monitors how actively people are talking about your products or services.

Brand mentions can be used in different ways to track how your audience is feeling, such as:

• Product launches. Monitor the public’s reaction during and after a new product launch and tweak your strategy based on real-time feedback.
• Customer service. Track customer mentions across platforms and respond quickly. If someone is unhappy with your product and mentions your brand, dealing with it as soon as possible is best to avoid reputation damage.
• Overall sentiment. Tracking your brand across social media can measure whether your audience is happy, upset or indifferent. This can help your brand make decisions over everything—from the content you post to how you reply to customers and resolve issues.

To simplify how to track brand mentions, a tool like Sprout’s Listening Query Builder for Brand Health makes it easy to build a granular campaign to track your mentions. It can track brand mentions and monitor common phrases or keywords (including nicknames and misspellings) associated with your brand to gauge how audiences feel about your company or products.

These insights are essential for making informed decisions that’ll drive your social media strategy forward.

2. Engagement metrics

Tracking likes, comments, shares and overall social media engagement rates is one of the best ways to understand which listening topics you should be focussing on to understand customer intent and experience.

Engagement metrics are important to see who is interacting with your brand and how often, and each engagement metric indicates a slightly different level of interest. While likes indicate initial approval of an overall message or topic (think of it as the lowest form of engagement), comments show a deeper level of interest in what your brand is saying or other specific keywords that you’re tuning into.

The bonus of tracking audience engagement is that it also helps you understand the demographics of the people talking about your brand. Analyzing who is engaging with specific topics and keywords makes it easier to identify patterns and craft future strategies.

3. Hashtag performance

Tracking the performance of specific hashtags can help marketers understand which topics or campaigns resonate with your audience.

Relevant tags make it easier for your target audience to find your content. But it’s important to know which hashtags are performing best to optimize this strategy. Sprout’s Hashtag Analytics can track multiple hashtags for your overall brand alongside specific hashtags for different demographics.

Tracking this metric allows you to swap out hashtags for better-performing tags and maximize post reach to your target audience.

4. Demographic insights

Understanding who is talking about your brand and their demographic features can help tailor your marketing strategies more effectively.

Demographic insights track information like age, gender and location to see if the people who are looking at your content match your target audience. For example, Sprout’s demographic data in Listening tracks what topics your audience is engaging with, where they live and the level of engagement they have with your campaigns.

Social media marketers can also see how different groups interact with content at different times. This can help them target people for seasonal campaigns.

5. Share of voice

Share of voice tracks your brand’s visibility on social media against your competitors. This metric lets you see exactly how strong your brand’s market presence is and whether you outperform the competition.

This metric gathers multiple different data points. For example, it can track social media engagement metrics like shares, comments and likes and benchmark them against your competitors. This will then determine if your target audience is engaging with your brand more than others.

Sprout’s Competitive Analysis Listening template has a Share of Voice tool that tracks all of these separate data points and aggregates them into user-friendly graphs.

Collecting and aggregating data can also be used for other marketing efforts, like PPC, SEO and media market share. It’s a quick and easy snapshot to understand how well you’re reaching your audience compared to the competition across various channels.

6. Sentiment analysis

Sentiment analysis is a temperature check on how your target audience feels about your brand. It analyzes the tone and emotions behind your brand’s social media mentions and conversations.

What makes sentiment analysis different from other metrics like brand mentions or engagement is that it tracks your audience’s net sentiment over time. Tracking helps you spot patterns and link positive and negative sentiments to specific campaigns or events.

A sentiment analysis tool, like Sprout’s, tracks overall sentiment across social media and bundles it into a positive or negative score. It also tracks how sentiment trends change over time, which helps understand how efforts like marketing campaigns or crisis management land with your audience.

7. Trend analysis

When you identify and analyze social listening trends within your industry or topic-related conversations, it helps you adjust strategies to current events or changes in consumer behavior.

Listening trend analysis goes beyond jumping on the latest meme trend. It looks at niche and industry-specific trends to see what words, brands and products your target audience is talking about.

A simple way to analyze these trends is with Sprout’s Conversation Overview. It gathers trending keywords and hashtags to help you see what content resonates with your audience during a specific timeframe.

8. Campaign performance

Campaign performance is an overarching measure of a specific campaign’s effectiveness and how an audience responds to your messaging.

Monitoring campaign performance allows you to understand the sentiment and interaction with specific hashtags and keywords related to your brand’s campaign. This broad look at a social media campaign helps marketers understand how well it met its objectives and what messaging resonated with your audience the most.

To stay ahead of the game when tracking campaign performance, a tool like Sprout’s Campaign Analysis Listening template can help. You can set up your Listening topic before launching your campaign, adding specific keywords and hashtags related to your campaign messaging. This helps you monitor conversations promptly, so you can see spikes and sentiment trends and make campaign adjustments as needed.

9. Influencer engagement

Finally, if your social media campaign also involves influencers, it’s important to measure the impact of their efforts.

Influencers are used to add a little extra fuel to a social media campaign, introduce your brand to a broader audience‌ and generate more interest in your posts. When measuring influencer engagement, look at metrics like engagement rate on influencer posts, the reach of these posts‌ and if their posts positively impact conversion rates.

Sprout’s influencer analytics tool, Sprout Social Influencer Marketing (formerly Tagger), can accurately measure and report ROI from your influencer campaigns alongside other campaigns you run.

These insights not only monitor the progress of influencer campaigns in real-time, but give you real data around how your target audiences respond to the influencer’s content.

Using Sprout Social to track social media listening metrics

Social media campaigns are looked at through various lenses to decide if they are successful or not.

The key for social media managers is to pick the right metrics to gauge performance. Social media listening metrics can go deeper into a campaign and track how your target audience feels, what people say about your brand and how well your posts tap into trending topics.

Sprout Social’s extensive social media listening tools provide insights into every piece of a campaign. Marketers like you can use social media listening tools to generate customizable reports with real-time data‌, see what posts are resonating most with an audience and make informed decisions to drive your social media strategy forward.

To start using social media listening metrics, you need a fail-proof framework. Download Sprout’s social media listening template and map out your strategy to get insights into every area of your campaigns.