Social Media Metrics Explained

22 October 2025

In the past, we explained why social media matter. This article focuses on social media metrics or statistics. We will explain what they are and give an overview of the different social media metrics. But first, let us start with a quick recap of why social media matter.

Why social media matter

Many lawyers underestimate the value of social media. Yet, it’s essential for engaging the modern legal consumer who operates in an online paradigm. After all, there are currently 5.4 billion social media users worldwide.

If you want to turn online prospects into clients, the ACT methodology is an efficient way to. ACT stands for attract, convert, transform.

Attract: Use social platforms to draw attention and traffic.
Convert: Turn strangers into content consumers, then into clients.
Transform: Leverage testimonials and reviews to attract more clients.

To use social media effectively, lawyers must start seeing themselves as publishers, and potential clients as content consumers. Regular, quality content builds credibility and nurtures long-term client relationships. Platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Reddit are ideal for demonstrating expertise and engaging with audiences. Social media are not just promotional tools. They are strategic assets for cultivating trust, which in turn results in converting leads, and transforming reputation into growth.

What are social media metrics?

Social media metrics are statistics about your social media posts. You can think of them as the measurable data points that reveal how people interact with and respond to content on social platforms.

What do these metrics measure? They range from basic indicators like likes, comments, shares, reach, and impressions to more sophisticated measures like click-through rates, conversions, and sentiment analysis. These show both audience reactions and whether content drives meaningful actions.

Why do they matter? Metrics connect online activity to business objectives, helping organizations refine strategies and understand audience behaviour. They reveal whether campaigns are generating genuine impact rather than just drawing attention.

How are they used? Rather than being isolated numbers, metrics form part of a comprehensive analytical framework. Various platforms provide their own dashboards, and when combined with external tools, these insights help assess brand health, optimize content, and predict trends.

And remember that they are part of a strategy. Effective use of social media metrics is about extracting actionable insights to guide decision-making, not just collecting impressive numbers.

Overview of the different social media metrics

The article (listed below in the sources) on Loomy makes a distinction between 3 different categories of social media metrics. For convenience’s sake, we will follow their categories.

Interaction Metrics

The name is self-explanatory: these are the statistics that keep track of how your audience interacts with your posts.

Followers and follower growth keep track of how many followers you have, and how this number changes over time. What you want is a solid growth number. If your number of followers decreases over time, you need to adjust your strategy.

Impressions or views keep track of how many times your content was seen. These days, your content is not only shown to your followers. Social media platforms use algorithms to show your content to other people, too. If the algorithm approves of your content, it may show it to many people in their ‘For you’ feeds. Related to this is the reach statistic. It reveals to how many unique accounts your post was shown.

Engagement rate is probably the most important metric. It measures all the interactions with your content, i.e., all the likes, comments, direct messages, shares and saves of your content, and it then divides that number by your followers, impressions, or reach.

Story completion rate is a metric that specifically applies to videos you post. People may not watch your entire video. This metric measures how much of your video content was watched, including what percentage of viewers watched the entire video.

Some platforms also offer statistics on the demographics of your audience, like age and gender.

Unique Metrics

The article in Loomy uses this category as the ‘other metrics’ category, i.e., those that are not interaction metrics, and are not cost-associated metrics either. They mainly have to do with how your audience responds to the content of your posts.

It is a good practice to keep track of your top performing content, i.e., the posts that have the highest engagement rate, the widest reach, and the highest conversion rate. It allows you to finetune your strategy and make it more successful.

Another interesting metric is the virality rate. You are familiar with how posts can go viral. This metric shows how fast your post is reaching a growing audience. “To calculate a post’s virality rate, divide the number of shares by the number of impressions it has. Then, multiply by 100 to get a percentage. The higher the number, the more ‘viral’ your post is.” (Loomy). Virality rate is typically considered more relevant for video posts.

Sometimes people find your posts not because they are following you or because they are shown by the algorithm. Instead, they find your content because of a search they performed, either on the social media platform or on a search engine. Search metrics keep track of what key words led people to your content.

Next, we have three metrics that have to do with brand recognition. For law firms, this basically relates to the name recognition and the reputation of your law firm.

The name “brand mentions” is self-explanatory. It keeps track of where and how often the name of your brand (or law firm) is mentioned.

Not only do you want your name to be mentioned, but you also want people to say positive things about you. Sentiment analysis keeps track of how people feel about your brand, whether they are happy with your services or not. It typically categorizes your brand mentions as negative, positive, or neutral.

A third brand-related metric is the social share of voice. It keeps track of how your brand mentions and sentiment analysis compare to those of your competitors. You typically will need a third-party tool to keep track of this metric.

Cost-associated social media metrics

The last category allows you to calculate the return on investment of your social media posts.

You usually want your social media posts to have a link to your website, your blog, etc. The Click-through Rate (CTR) metric measures how many of the people who see your post end up clicking on the link. You want a high CTR.

The Conversion Rate keeps track of the percentage of people who take a desired action. Conversion rate usually refers to the percentage of people who end up becoming your clients. But before they do so, they typically must take certain steps, like read your blog, watch your videos, etc. So, the conversion rate for individual posts has to do with one of those steps they take. In other words, different posts have different calls to action (click a link, watch a video, …), and the conversion rate for each post then keeps track of what percentage responded to that call to action.

Cost per Click (CPC) is a factor in paid social media campaigns. These can be ads, or you can pay a social media platform to show your posts to a larger audience. CPC measures how much you pay for each click you then get. When using paid social media campaigns, this is a crucial metric to a) determine your budget, and to b) assess the effectiveness of your campaign.

The Customer Acquisition Cost calculates how much it effectively costs to get a new client through your social media campaigns. In essence, this metric show what your return on investment is for your social media strategy.

Conclusion

Social media metrics show you how effective your social media strategy is. Of these, the basic interaction metrics – like impressions or views, engagement rate, followers and follower growth – are important, as they already give you useful information. The cost-associated metrics help you see how your return on investment is doing. The other metrics give you more information on how to tweak your content.

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