The go-to social media KPI template for 2025

We surveyed 900 social practitioners and 300 marketers for the 2025 Sprout Social Index™ and found a key disconnect: while teams focus on qualitative outcomes like production efficiency or feedback, leadership is looking for numbers. This is a major opportunity for social media managers.

By presenting KPIs that show the impact of your social media efforts, you can do more than get your leadership’s attention—you can earn their buy-in.

The right social KPIs create a clear connection between your work and measurable business outcomes—whether it’s brand awareness, customer satisfaction or revenue. Of course, raw data alone isn’t enough. It’s all about identifying the metrics that truly matter and weaving them into a compelling story.

In this guide, we’ll show you how to choose the KPIs that’ll help you tell a more compelling ROI story. We’ve also created resources to help you pinpoint the right KPIs quickly and easily:

• The social media metrics map: An exhaustive list of social media KPIs, sorted by each stage of the marketing funnel.
• The social media KPI worksheet template: A resource that’ll help you develop KPIs that ladder up to business goals.

Before you can set KPIs, you need to set goals grounded in your company’s marketing and business objectives. Why? Because when your goals are tied to the bigger picture, it’s easier to measure true impact and communicate social media’s value to leadership.

Social media is unique—it drives customer care, talent recruitment, market research and more. But not all of these opportunities will be equally important to your business at any given time. Identifying where your team can make the biggest difference ensures your KPIs are both strategic and impactful.

To get there, collaborate with leadership to uncover:

• What are the top business priorities for the next quarter or year?
• How can social media support these goals (e.g., awareness, lead generation, engagement)?
• Which campaigns, launches or initiatives need to take priority?

When you align KPIs with these priorities, you’re not just measuring activity—you’re demonstrating how social drives meaningful business outcomes. That’s the difference between checking a box and setting smarter, results-driven KPIs.

Think campaign first

Big-picture metrics are helpful for tracking the overall health of your social presence, but they’re often too broad to deliver actionable insights—or resonate with stakeholders outside the social team.

That’s where campaign-level KPIs come in. Setting KPIs at the campaign level lets you measure performance against specific goals, providing granular insights that tell a more compelling story to business leaders. Instead of vague takeaways, you can show exactly how social contributed to a product launch, lead generation effort or brand awareness initiative.

To make this work, accurate tracking is essential. You can manually add UTM parameters to your links to ensure consistent data collection. However, tools like Sprout Social simplify the process by automatically appending UTMs to your posts, reducing manual effort and ensuring accuracy.

Using goals to inform tactics

Identifying the top marketing objectives that social supports will allow you to come up with the right tactics for execution.

For example, if your top goal is to increase awareness and you’re focused on the objective of reaching new customers, your social strategy might include tactics like:

• Partner with three new creators to create 3-5 pieces of content each per quarter
• Showcase team members’ expertise on your social profiles with 5-10 meet the team posts per quarter
• Increase Instagram Stories content by 20% with a ratio of 2:1:1 video to photography to interactive content

These tactics are tied to clear outputs—like content volume and execution—so you can focus on what you control: initiating partnerships, creating and publishing content and driving engagement.

Once you’ve determined your goals, objectives and social tactics, the next step is to identify the right metrics to set as your KPIs. These metrics are what you’ll use to measure how your audience responds to this approach and how that contributes to your performance.

Anyone who’s familiar with the SMART goal framework understands the value of setting measurable goals. However, some goals are easier to measure than others.

Metrics like reach, impressions‌ and engagement are straightforward, as they’re directly available within native platforms. These can be tracked through manual data pulls or social media management tools. However, linking social media to revenue impact requires deeper data integrations to embed social insights throughout the customer funnel.

Collaborate with your data analytics team or those responsible for marketing team reporting to identify where your key KPIs live—whether in a single platform or across multiple tools. This collaboration helps build a reliable reporting infrastructure, giving you confidence in your social media performance metrics.

The case for multi-touch attribution

If you’re only measuring social media’s direct sales impact to track revenue generation, you’re missing out. When Sprout’s social team switched to a multi-touch attribution model, they uncovered a 5800% increase in additional pipeline impact.

Multi-touch attribution assigns value to each touchpoint in a customer’s journey to purchase, recognizing that every step plays a role.

For example, a prospect might discover your brand through paid ads but make a purchase after engaging with your organic social content. Social teams deserve credit for their contributions to this journey.

To achieve this, you’ll need both disciplined UTM tagging and an integrated martech stack that connects social efforts to revenue. Tools like Sprout Social integrate with Salesforce, Tableau‌ and Google Analytics, enabling brands to measure everything from discoverability to message resonance—and, ultimately, revenue.

With Sprout’s network and software integrations, you can track your most important social media KPIs seamlessly.

Our long-standing partnerships with platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn‌, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, Threads, YouTube and more provide us deep access to their data. Combined with integrations with top software providers like Salesforce Service Cloud, Tableau and Shopify, Sprout ensures you can measure the full impact of social across the customer journey.

With My Reports, part of Sprout’s Premium Analytics, you can build completely customizable reports using drag-and-drop widgets. Compare performance across key networks using multiple charts, tables and visualizations—like bar and line charts—all within a single report.

With Premium Analytics, you also get:

• Customized views that can be tailored to specific stakeholders from senior leaders to customer care teams, and distributed using dynamic shareable links.
• Text-based annotations for executive summaries—perfect for providing rich context on strategic goals and big wins.
• Analyze by AI Assist, which speeds up time to insights by identifying the most significant data points in a chart and presenting them in clear, easy-to-read sentences.

Schedule a demo

If you don’t define what success means for your social team, who will?

Intentional KPI setting is more than just a checkbox activity. It’s a chance for you to set yourself up for future success. Use our social media metrics map and KPI template to make the most informed selections possible. These tools will also help you determine the best way to share social data with other stakeholders.

Get the social media metrics map

Get the social media KPI worksheet template

If you’re looking for help tracking your new KPIs, sign up for a personalized demo of Sprout Social’s Premium Analytics add-on.