Social media metrics to track, and where to find them

You post every week, and every so often you open Instagram Insights, see a wall of numbers, and close it again. Likes went up, reach went down, and you still can't say whether any of it brought in a customer.

Social media metrics are only useful if they answer a question you actually have. This guide shows which numbers matter for a small business or creator, what each one means, where to find it on every platform, and a simple monthly report you can fill in from them in about half an hour.

Start with what you want from social media

Before any number, decide what social media is for in your business. Each goal has its own metrics, and the rest are background noise.

Pick one main goal per quarter. A new business usually wants reach, and for reach, posting on more platforms often beats posting more often. An established local business with loyal followers usually wants actions. Trying to optimise all three at once tends to mean optimising none.

The metrics, in plain words

Platforms name things differently, so here's what the common terms mean:

• Reach: how many different accounts saw your post. One person seeing it three times counts once.
• Views (or impressions): how many times your post was seen, counting repeats. Instagram replaced impressions with views in April 2025, so if your numbers jumped around then, that's why.
• Engagement: the actions people take on a post: likes, comments, shares, saves.
• Engagement rate: engagement divided by an audience number. Tools disagree on which one: some divide by reach, some by views, some by followers. Pick one and always compare like with like.
• Saves and shares: the strongest signals that a post was useful. Someone wants to come back to it, or show it to someone else.
• Follower growth: new followers minus unfollows, over a period. The trend matters more than the total.
• Link clicks and profile visits: people taking a step toward you.
• Watch time and retention: for video, how long people kept watching. A video that loses most viewers in the first two seconds needs a better opening, not a better caption (more on vertical video).

Likes are fine as a quick mood check, but on their own they rarely tell you what to do next.

Where to find them on each platform

Every platform has free analytics built in, though some keep the good parts for business or paid accounts.

Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Meta Business Suite also show when your followers are most active, which is the starting point for picking the best times to post.

Track clicks and sales with UTM links

Platform analytics stop at the click. To see what happens on your website, add UTM tags to your links, so your website analytics knows where each visitor came from. A link for an autumn sale on Instagram might look like this:

yoursite.com/sale?utm_source=instagram&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=autumn-sale

Use a different utm_source for each platform and the same utm_campaign for everything in one campaign. In your website analytics you'll then see visits and sales per platform, which is the closest you'll get to "what did social media earn us this month". Our two-week product launch plan shows how to use this for a launch.

A monthly report you can copy

Once a month, fill in one row per channel. It takes about half an hour, and after three months you'll see patterns no single week shows.

Then write three short notes underneath: what worked, what didn't, and one thing to try next month, and put that one thing into your content calendar.

Here's a made-up example of reading it. Say Instagram had 12 posts and Facebook 8. Instagram's reach was higher, but Facebook brought most of the link clicks to your booking page. The takeaway isn't "Facebook is better"; it's that your booking posts belong on Facebook, while Instagram is where new people find you. That's the kind of decision a monthly report is for.

Compare fairly

A few habits stop the numbers from misleading you:

1. Compare the same length of time. A 31-day month against a 28-day one, or a month with a holiday in it, isn't a fair fight.
2. Use averages per post when the number of posts changed. More posts usually means more reach in total, but not necessarily more per post.
3. Spot the outlier. One post that took off can make a whole month look great. Note it, learn from it, and look at the month without it too.
4. Don't compare platforms by raw numbers. A view on TikTok and a view on Facebook aren't the same thing. Compare each platform with its own past.
5. Watch for platform changes. When a platform redefines a metric, like Instagram's switch to views, your chart changes even if your audience didn't.

Seeing all your channels in one place

The hardest part of a monthly report is collecting the numbers from six apps. (You can even ask ChatGPT or Claude for them through a social media MCP server.) A tool like Freqel brings them together: Insights shows posts, reach, impressions, likes, comments, shares, saves, engagement rate and followers per channel, wherever the platform provides them. Freqel's engagement rate is likes, comments and shares divided by views, and it's left blank for platforms that don't report views, like Bluesky, instead of guessing.

Whatever you use, the point is the same: look once a month, decide one thing, and change your next month's plan. If you also report to clients, this guide to managing social media for multiple clients covers how to present it.

Wrap-up

You don't need to track everything. Pick your goal, follow the three or four social media metrics that match it, add UTM tags to your links, and fill in one simple report a month. When a number moves, ask why, and let the answer shape what you post next. For ideas on what to change, see what makes a post perform well on every platform.