How to Use Social Media Metrics to Measure Engagement

I get asked this one question ALL the time. "How do you measure success on LinkedIn?" At the end of the day LinkedIn is a social media platform meaning you can track and measure the data of your posts to help you better understand how you are performing. When working with clients, there are three main data points we measure to track how things are going. 💡 Engagement Rate-  Engagement rate can be calculated by taking the number of engagements your post received (likes, comments, shares) and dividing it by the number of impressions on your post (people who saw your post). Simply put: Engagements / Impressions = Engagement rate. Industry benchmarks for engagement rate is 0.35%. 🌟 2% or higher is considered “influencer status.” 🌟 💡 Reach Rate- Calculate the reach rate of a post by dividing the number of reach or impressions by the number of followers you have. The industry benchmark for reach rate is 6%. Meaning that on average 6% of followers see your content. 💡 Audience Growth- Your % change in followers is calculated by comparing your total follower count within the current date range to the total count in the previous date range. The industry benchmark is 1% growth / month. You can find these metrics and many more in your LinkedIn Analytics dashboard on your home page. Data experts, are there any that I’m missing or advice you give to those leveraging data to better understand LinkedIn performance?

Likes and comments on LinkedIn matter—but they don’t tell the whole story. Here are the “less obvious” success metrics you should be tracking too: 🔹 1. Profile Views Per Post → A spike in profile views = people checking out who you are. → Are they in your target audience? If they're from random industries, your content might be too broad or irrelevant to your niche. 🔹 2. DMs & Connection Requests → Are people reaching out after your posts? That’s a sign your content is working. → But again, are they potential clients, partners, or industry peers? If most inbound messages are unrelated to your goals, you may need to refine your positioning. 🔹 3. Outbound Connection Acceptance Rate → If less than 40% of your connection requests are accepted (granted you're reaching out to your ICP), your profile might need work. → A high acceptance rate means your profile and content are aligned with your ideal audience. 🔹 4. Website Clicks & Email Sign-Ups → Are your posts leading people to your site or newsletter? → If not, you may need to rethink your content strategy. Some content grabs attention, some builds trust, and some drives action. If you're only creating engagement-focused posts, you're staying visible, but not turning that visibility into results. 🔹 5. Post Longevity → How long is your post staying in people’s feeds? → Posts that get engagement 48+ hours later signal strong content resonance. Pay attention and dissect what made them successful. 📌 Takeaway: Engagement matters, but it’s not just about likes and comments. The best posts spark interest, profile visits, DMs, and conversions. Are you tracking any of these?

Over the past year, we grew Owner.com's Instagram by more than 600% and built a repeatable system that turns organic content into pipeline. Here's 3 things I learned about measuring b2b demand from Instagram: 1. Engagement metrics are noisy. A post with 1,000 likes might look great, but it doesn’t tell you who’s serious. The most valuable signal we found was unique clicks to our Linktree. Unlike total clicks, they strip out repeat traffic, giving us a clean read on how many new people were landing on our website. And because every link in our Linktree is UTM-tagged, we can see exactly which tools, videos, or campaigns are pulling that traffic through. That makes Instagram measurable in the same way as any paid channel. 2. Growth is only valuable if it reaches the right people. One of the most important proof points for us was that 95% of the traffic from Instagram came from the U.S., exactly where our core prospects are. That’s rare, because social media is global by default and audience quality is hard to control. To de-risk this, we’ve started experimenting with U.S.-targeted social content designed to help the algorithm narrow distribution, making posts less relevant outside the U.S. and more relevant to the audience we want. For B2B, that alignment between where your audience grows and where your customers are matters as much as the growth itself. 3. Usually, there’s a tradeoff: the content that builds audience doesn’t always convert, and the content that converts doesn’t always scale. But what surprised me this year was how often those two curves moved together. When we had spikes in Instagram engagement, we also saw parallel jumps in Linktree clicks (see charts below), PLG submissions, and demo requests. Growth wasn’t vanity, it was fueling demand at the same time. (Bonus) 4. We know that not every demo can be traced directly back to a single Instagram post. Paid campaigns create awareness, and some of that halo inevitably spills into organic. People see an ad, get curious, click into our profile, and eventually end up on our Linktree. That’s why we treat Instagram as part of an ecosystem: paid and organic reinforce each other, and both contribute to demand creation.