Unlock how your total social efforts impact your cross-platform performance.
Measuring social performance and total social impact gives you a clear view of how your content works and what actually moves people to act. It helps you see which posts influence awareness, engagement, and revenue so you can back decisions with not only instinct, but evidence.
When you understand the full impact of your content across channels, you can identify what drives real value, make adjustments quickly, and justify investment with confidence.
Tracking the impact of cross-channel marketing performance reveals what resonates and where your efforts yield the best results. When you measure results across platforms, you get a uniform view of how different platforms, post types, and cadence work together to influence awareness, engagement, and conversions. This clarity helps you identify strengths, address weaknesses, and understand where growth occurs at specific stages of the digital marketing funnel.
Consistent measurement also helps quantify the contribution of individual tactics to marketing goals. While it can be challenging to tie tactics to outcomes, particularly when considering different platforms and post types, benchmarking performance to similar brands or industries is a great yardstick to gauge how everything works together.
A clear measurement system keeps your social strategy grounded in results, not opinions. Consistently measuring the contribution of each channel to social media goals reveals where adjustments can be made and where focus can be directed for stronger performance.
Here are the five basic steps every social media team should take to measure social media success:
Start by selecting metrics that reflect real business value. Focus on indicators that show how content contributes to awareness, engagement, or conversions. Choose a small set of meaningful data points so you can track performance with clarity and avoid getting buried in numbers that don’t move the needle.
Once your metrics are locked in, set clear targets tied to broader objectives. Define what success looks like in terms of reach, engagement, or traffic, so every team member knows what they are working toward. Strong goals help you measure progress in context and create alignment across campaigns and channels.
Pull your data on a consistent schedule to monitor trends and track shifts in performance. Utilize cross-channel reporting to understand how posts work together and where your audience responds most effectively. Regular measurement says what your content achieves and surfaces insights you can act on.
Use your findings to adjust your approach. Strengthen tactics that perform well and revise or replace those that fall short of expectations. Testing formats, timing, or creative assets based on real results helps you move with intent.
Measurement is a cycle. Revisit your metrics, goals, and results with a regular cadence to keep your strategy sharp. As platforms, audience behaviors, and business priorities shift, this loop helps efforts stay relevant and tied to outcomes that matter.
If you’re dealing with a timely campaign, set a specific date to collect data and analyze your findings. Maybe you’re running a holiday campaign like eos, where it makes sense to stop measuring success post-New Year. Use insights from the data to inform future campaigns, allowing you to replicate successes and avoid mistakes.
Understanding the most important metrics to track can be daunting when you really get into it. If your primary objectives center on conversions, metrics like ROI are more relevant than metrics like impressions. And while it might be tempting to measure everything at your fingertips, impressions are not a wholly relevant KPI for your goal.
One way brands can measure the overall impact of their social media performance is through Dash Social’s proprietary metric, Total Social Impact (TSI).
How does each aspect of social media management impact overall performance? Total Social Impact (TSI) is Dash Social’s proprietary metric that helps brands understand their performance across owned, earned, and paid media. TSI takes into account each platform and type of post to help you understand the totality of your social media efforts, from content performance to brand awareness to audience engagement.
Why it matters → TSI helps brands understand how each channel’s performance intersects with that of the others.
Charlotte Tilbury Tops Dash Social’s TSI Leaderboard
The brand performs 640x higher than the average beauty brand score.
“Charlotte Tilbury is the shining star [because] they are very much the OG creator brand. Before creators were a thing, Charlotte was a creator in and of herself, and she is at the front and center of everything they do”
Jillian Robinson,
Director of Global Communications and Events at Dash Social
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Content metrics measure the contribution of each post to broader goals. These insights help you pinpoint winning formats, refine weaker ones and optimize your content mix. By understanding performance at the post level, you can build a strategy grounded in evidence rather than intuition.
Key metrics include:
Why it matters → These metrics help shape a content plan that maximizes impact based on what consistently works.
Awareness metrics indicate how frequently people encounter your brand in feeds or discover you through new channels. They help you evaluate visibility and whether people are becoming familiar with your content over time. These indicators are essential for campaigns focused on reach, recognition or top-of-funnel growth.
Key metrics include:
Why it matters → Awareness metrics help you understand how well your brand stays top of mind and how many new people you’re attracting.
Beyond basic engagement counts, quality metrics show how invested your audience is in your content. These signals help you understand the depth of interaction rather than the volume. When you analyze the strength of engagement, you can identify which posts build real connections and which need refinement.
Key metrics include:
Why it matters → These metrics point to how meaningful and lasting your interactions are, helping you improve content that holds attention.
There isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer to the best place to measure social media success. Just like KPIs depend on marketing goals, the places you measure success depend on your goals, too. And social media success doesn’t end at social media platforms, either. Social success extends to other digital touchpoints as well, so it’s important to consider these when analyzing performance.
Here are the various areas brands can examine to gauge social media success, along with the key metrics that determine the impact of social media efforts.
Measuring website traffic is crucial for various purposes, including tracking conversions, measuring engagement, and assessing interest in specific campaigns. If you want your audience to take a particular action or want to learn more about users’ journey from your social media account to key website pages, metrics around website traffic help you understand how users travel from post to page.
Website traffic metrics include:
If you’re not in the midst of an awareness campaign, you’re likely promoting a specific product or service. Sales conversions are essential to connecting social media activity to your bottom line. Connect these sales metrics to specific posts and campaigns to determine the impact social has on sales.
Some of the most popular sales conversion metrics to track include:
Social media is more than a sales tool, it’s an important line of communication directly from your brand to your audience and customers. From responding to customers with a cheeky comment to escalating real issues through DMs and comments, customer success metrics help you measure customer experience success while smoothing any friction you might identify.
Customer success metrics brands should measure are:
Social media advertising is another area where brands measure success. Measure these advertising metrics to determine how your social media ads perform:
You can measure the impact of your overall social media marketing efforts with TSI. Painting a comprehensive picture of social performance that includes everything at your brand’s disposal, like creative ideas, community engagement, and the actual platforms, is challenging. TSI quantifies how these activities work together to provide a key measurement metric.
Engagement rate is one of the most common indicators of success, as it shows the percentage of people who interacted with your content compared to the total number of views. It helps you gauge whether your posts resonate with and inspire your audience to take action.
