The New Debate Over Social Media Metrics

How do you define success on social media?

Engagement? Impressions? Click-throughs?

Social media experts and marketing pros are used to balancing these metrics to monitor performance of organic campaigns. An insightful post on a relevant topic is likely to generate likes, shares and brand exposure all at the same time. 

Yet as social media platforms adjust their algorithms to better meet their own business goals, the landscape of social media metrics and KPIs is changing.

LinkedIn and X have both admitted to downplaying content with external links in recent months in favor of long-form content on their sites. For the social media platforms, it makes sense. A user who leaves the site is less likely to spend more time scrolling.

But for brands, that often means that social media tactics are harder to align with broader marketing or business goals.

To Link Out or Not to Link Out?

Here’s an example: Let’s say a brand has a recap from a recent industry conference. That content could be posted on social in one of two ways: Post the whole recap to social media or post a short teaser with a link to the full post on the company’s website.

The full piece posted to social could be enhanced with hashtags and by tagging relevant users, improving its reach. The full post, without a link, would get more play according to the social platform’s algorithms.

Posting a short teaser on social with a link to the company website, on the other hand, would drive web traffic. It could increase clicks to other web pages and capture conversions. But social platform algorithms would be less likely to serve that post to users.

In the past, the two tactics could be combined – a robust in-platform post, optimized with hashtags, that also linked to the company website. Today, that “yes, and” approach risks reducing the number of people who see the content.

So, what are social media pros and marketing teams to do? The answer, as with so much in communications, is to track back to the goals.

Here’s how the team at Braithwaite breaks down common goals connected to organic social media:

• Establish New Relationships – exposing executives or brands to new audiences on social media
  • Metrics that matter: Follower growth, impressions, shares, video views
• Deepen Relationships – creating deeper connections with established audiences
  • Metrics that matter: Engagement (comments, shares, etc.)
• Compel Action – driving audiences to act and engage
  • Metrics that matter: Click-through rates, website referrals

It’s important to note that it’s not just social media platforms altering their approach. Google has launched countless features over the last several years all aimed at keeping users on the search results page (or compelling brands to pay for user clicks to their websites).