Establishing a social media presence has become mission critical for just about every industry. Successfully operating a company or building a brand is next to impossible without it. Especially if you are hoping for these endeavors to enjoy sustained growth.
If exceptions to this stance exist, they are hard to spot. From white shoe law firms to the most well-known sportsbooks outlined at Online Sports Betting to Fortune 500 companies to small businesses, having a social media presence is a non-negotiable part of marketing strategies. Now more than ever, these platforms are how people find you and engage or use your services.
Yet, while the importance of building a social media following tends to get emphasized ad nauseam, the process of figuring out how to measure your success is more opaque.
By and large, everybody gets caught up in follow counts. That is flat-out wrong. Sure, a huge following can help. But even smaller accounts are able to press the right buttons and grow their business. This is predominantly done through emphasizing a number of other key metrics. And while there is no one-size-fits all for every company, brand or individual, the following measurements should be a central focus for everyone.
Impressions and Reach are the King of Social Media Metrics
If we were going to rank these key performance indicators (KPIs) in terms of their importance and effectiveness, impressions and reach would finish in the top spots.
Though defining social media impressions, specifically, can get convoluted, the Asana team does a nice job simplifying it, as you can see below:
“Impressions refer to the number of times your content showed up on someone’s feed—in other words, how many people saw one of your posts. Impressions won’t tell you whether or not your audience engaged with your content, but knowing how many times it was displayed is a good indicator of its value. Tracking impressions is useful if you’re worried about overwhelming users with too many posts. If impressions are high but reach is low, you may want to cut back. You can also use this metric to track posts in real time. If you publish a post and it immediately gets few to no impressions, that could be an early sign that you may need to reframe your content.”
On the flip side, “reach” measures the number of people who see your content. This number will often be lower than impressions, because it counts only unique viewers. For example, if the same person scrolls past your post in their feed on multiple occasions, it will only count as one on the reach scale. You would, however, rack up multiple impressions for that.
Increasing reach and impressions is paramount. Trial and error will always be the best way to perfect your strategy. Test out different tones and caption styles. If one performs better than others, you should lean into it.
Depending on the platform, hashtags can also be a great way to increase reach and impressions. Just don’t overdue. An inordinate number of hashtags can often get treated as spam in algorithms on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, etc.
Research Hashtags Like It’s Your Job…Because It Is
Hashtags can often make or break a post. Especially for smaller accounts.
While they are not the end-all, be-all, algorithms use hashtags to sort content. If you are making a post about artificial intelligence use in the workplace, tagging a post with “#artificialintelligence” will help put in front of the right audience.
Choosing hashtags can be a chore in itself, but it’s still doable. The trick is balancing mass appeal with specificity.
For instance, if you are running a fashion memes account, a hashtag like “#fashionmeme” is more accurate but has a smaller reach than “#clothes.”
Finding the middle ground is critical. Micro hashtags with niche audiences have their use. But you should also cater to higher-upside audiences. A hashtag like “#fashionmeme” is actually a good example. It has broad appeal without being too vague.
Sticking with technology as another example, using “#artificialintelligence” is more beneficial than “#ai” because the latter will also direct content to audiences drawn to posts about former NBA superstar Allen Iverson.
Shares and Saves are Gaining Steam in the Social Media Discourse
Remember how we said reach and impressions were the two most important social media metrics of 2026? Well, shares and saves are close to tying, if not usurping, both of them.
People use to measure social media success purely in terms of likes, reposts and follower counts. Those have fallen by the wayside as people become stingier with their likes, reposts and follows. This user behavior is likely owed to their impact on algorithms. The science on it is fuzzy, but people seem to believe that algorithms exaggerate interest in similar topics and posts based on things they like or repost and accounts they follow. Basically, your feed’s population is more impacted by what you like and repost and who you follow.
Sharing and saving posts will have a similar effect; just not to the same degree. Again, it’s tough to confirm, but public endorsements of content seems to have a stronger influence on algorithms.
It isn’t hard to see this trend playing out in real time. Scroll through some of the most viral posts on your social media platform of choice. TikTok and IG, in particular, are easiest. They publicly show how many times a post has been shared. And it won’t take long before you notice that many of the most popular posts have more shares and saves than likes or posts.
Ergo, shares and saves are metrics you need to monitor like a hawk. If you are testing out a new posting style, product, form of content or anything else, tracking how many times it’s saved and shared will give you an excellent hold on which approach resonates the most—and is spreading furthest.
Other metrics are worth your time, too. But if you prioritize these three, you’ll have a solid blueprint for measuring overarching social media exposure and, by extension, success.