Measure your social media success

Oct 14, 2026
Knowledge

Procedure Steps

Article updated: March 20, 2026

Measure your social media success

Analyzing your social results may feel overwhelming at first, especially because of the amount of data available. It may be challenging to know what success looks like, what to measure, and what actions to take to achieve the social media goals you set for your business.

Success on social means different things to different organizations. That’s why it’s important to first clarify your goals and then measure against them. Whether you’re looking to get your brand in front of more people (build brand awareness), encourage more of your audience to interact with you on social (boost engagement), or drive more of your fans and followers to your website (drive conversion)- every goal has different metrics of success.

In this article, we’ll walk you through everything you need to know about measuring social media success with Hootsuite.

Find out how your posts performed on social

How do you know if your posts are successful on social? Which metrics should you focus on to determine whether or not you’re doing a good job at posting content that grabs your audience’s attention and interest?

Go to Analytics to get started. Read on to learn how Hootsuite can help you determine which posts your audience notices and interacts with the most, and what to do next.

Review your overall post performance

Start by going to Organic reporting and selecting Post performance. This will give you an overview of how your posts performed on your social networks. Select a social network and account, and then a date range to review your results. Learn more about reviewing your overall post performance.

Examples and tips

Say you’re interested to learn which of your Facebook posts your audience loved most in the last 30 days. Select Last 30 days from the date range, select Edit columns, select the metric called Reactions: Love, and then select Apply. Or if you want to see how your collaboration posts on Instagram are performing, select Edit columns, select the metric called Collaborators, and then select Apply.

Edit columns showing the reactions love metric selected.

You’ll see a new column in your view with the number of reactions your posts received in the last 30 days.

Tips:

Select Reactions: Love from the top of the table to sort posts by the highest or lowest number of reactions.
Analyze the posts with the highest number of reactions. What do you notice? Do they include questions or some surprising information? Do they include photos, videos, or links?
Make a note of all the elements that could have contributed to its high engagement and try to replicate them in your next posts.

Check out these tips on how to build the perfect post.

Analyze post performance by goal

Hootsuite provides various report templates that make it easy to measure post results against business goals. For example, the Performance by goal report templates are pre-built with key metrics that tie back to specific goals such as awareness, conversion, and engagement.

Select Create a report and choose a goal under Performance by goal. Each goal category includes several report templates that you can use to analyze your post results.

Examples and tips:

Say you want to track and analyze your post engagement and see how many people interact with your posts across all social networks. Select Engagement under Performance by goal, and then create a report like Post engagement. The report shows a side-by-side comparison of how many impressions, likes, reactions, and comments your posts received in the selected date range across all social networks.

Tips:

Review your post engagement rate to get a sense of how many of the people who saw your posts interacted with them. For example, if your Instagram posts appeared on people’s screens 34 times and received one comment and one like, that’s a 7.14% post engagement rate. Most social media marketing experts agree that a good engagement rate is between 1% to 5%.
Compare results to the previous week to identify issues or trends. Open the date range selector, select Last 7 days, and then select Compare with another period to compare results with Previous 7 days. If you notice a significant decrease in engagement, like in the example below, you’ll want to investigate what might have caused the drop and ways to increase your engagement.

For tips to encourage more people to interact with your posts, see How to Increase Social Media Engagement.

Analyze post performance by social network

Analyze results for a specific social network like Facebook or X and see which one’s worth investing more time and resources into. Select Create a report and choose a social network under Performance by network.

Performance by network with report templates options.

Hootsuite provides multiple report templates to track your post results on each social network.

Analyze post results that matter to you

If you’re familiar with metrics and have specific results that you want to measure, you can create a custom report and add the metrics you’d like to track.

Select Create a report, and then create a Custom report. Select Analytics to display all available metrics. You can either select a social network to view metrics by network or search for specific metrics to add to your report. To track results for your posts, search for metric names that start with “Post”. Find out more about metrics in Hootsuite.

Measure audience engagement with your brand

Are people interacting with your brand on social? When you share a new post, how many people see it? And out of those who see it, how many click to view your Page or other posts, and how many decide to like or follow your Page? Out of your existing fans and followers, how many like, react, click, comment, share, or interact in other ways with your post?

You can use reports to get answers and learn how successful you are at sparking conversation with your audience.

Select Create a report and choose a goal. Each goal category includes several report templates that you can use to analyze your post results.

Track brand engagement by goal

Hootsuite provides report templates that make it easy to measure brand engagement results against business goals. The Performance by goal report templates are pre-built with key metrics that tie back to specific goals such as awareness, engagement, and conversion.

Tips:

Review the number of inbound messages you received on each social network. Depending on the network, inbound messages can be comments, posts that tag your Page or profile, private messages, and more.
Check out Inbound messages by Sentiment to understand how many of the messages you received are positive or negative. If you notice a high number of negative messages, you’ll want to investigate further and determine what’s causing the negative sentiment towards your brand.
Take a look at Inbound messages by Keyword frequency to identify the most popular keywords that your audience uses when talking to or about your brand. For example, if you notice a high number of negative messages, this metric can give you some insight into what’s making your audience unhappy.

Track brand engagement by social network

Measure audience interaction with your brand on specific social networks like Facebook or X. Select Create a report, and then choose a social network under Performance by network. Each category includes several report templates you can use to track how your audience engages with your brand on social.

Examples and tips:

If you want to measure audience engagement with your brand on LinkedIn, select LinkedIn Pages, and then create a LinkedIn engagement report.

The report shows how many people visited and interacted with your Pages and posts.

Tips:

Look at metrics like Page impressions, Page engagement, and Page engagement rate. These help you understand how many times people interacted with your Page and content after seeing them in their feeds. They’re important metrics to focus on as they tell you whether or not your audience finds your Page and content relevant, interesting, or useful.
Review the Posts table metric to understand how many interactions each of your posts received in your selected date range.

You can explore similar report templates for other social networks, and use them to track your brand’s engagement on each.

Track brand engagement metrics that matter to you

If you’re familiar with metrics and have specific results that you want to measure, you can create a custom report and add the metrics you’d like to track.

Find out which posts to promote

Deciding which posts to promote depends on your business goals. Do you want to grow your audience and reach more people, spark conversation, or encourage more people to visit your website or online shop?

With Hootsuite's metrics and reports, you can review performance for your recent posts and make an informed decision about which posts are worth promoting to achieve your goals.

Select Create a report and choose a goal. Each goal category includes several report templates that you can use to analyze your post results.

Increase visibility for your brand

If your goal is to reach more people who might have an interest in your brand, you may want to promote a post that a lot of people have already viewed.

For example, you can go to Post performance to find your most viewed Facebook posts. Select Facebook, and then select a Page. Select Edit column to add metrics like Reach or Organic impressions to your view. Display values in descending order to view the posts with the highest reach or number of impressions.

Boost engagement

If your goal is to encourage more people to interact with your accounts, you might choose to promote a post that has already received many clicks, comments, reactions, or shares.

For example, you can go to Post performance to find your most engaging LinkedIn posts. Select LinkedIn Pages, and then select a Page. Select Edit column to add metrics like Comments, Engagement rate, or Video views. Display values in descending order to view the posts with the highest engagement.

Drive traffic to your website

If your goal is to welcome more people to your website or online shop, you might choose to promote a post that has already received a lot of link clicks.

For example, you can go to Post performance to find the Facebook posts with the highest number of link clicks. Select Facebook, and then select a Page. Select Edit column to add the Link clicks metric to your view. Display values in descending order to view the posts with the highest number of links clicks.

When you’ve decided on the posts you want to promote, visit About boosted posts to learn how to promote Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn posts.

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Measure your social media success

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