The Beginner’s Guide to Social Media Metrics: Audience Growth Rate

Social media can be an incredibly important tool for your business. But it can also be overwhelming. You’re following what’s being said about your industry and brand, your team is trying to produce and share great content, you’re interacting with customers, finding prospects and you’re trying to make sense of it all. The biggest question you’re most likely trying to answer is if your work in social is helping you achieve real business results. To find out, you need to measure your efforts by tracking the right social media metrics.

Not sure where to start? In this Beginner’s Guide to Social Media Metrics, we’ll break down the social metrics you should be tracking, describe how to measure them, and most importantly, explain how you can use them so you never miss out on important insights.

So far we’ve covered mentions, sentiment, reach and exposure, engagement and Share of Voice. Today, we’ll break down Audience Growth Rate.

Audience Growth Rate

Audience Growth Rate measures the change in a brand or company’s following on social media networks. Tracking your Audience Growth Rate on each individual network will determine the average rate of increase or decrease in your fans or followers over time.

How to Measure Audience Growth Rate:

Benchmark your audience on each social network and measure the increase in those numbers every day, week, month or for another specific time table to determine the speed at which you’re attaining new fans.

How to Use Audience Growth Rate:

• Evaluate performance on each network. Identify which networks are generating the greatest growth and investigate how you can apply your success on those networks to others.


• Track your growth rate during the course of a campaign, product launch, or other new initiative to evaluate its success.


• Expand in the right demographic. Pay attention to the gender, age or location of new followers (some networks will provide this breakdown or you could manually investigate) to measure if your strategy is helping your brand reach your target audience.


• Research the competition. Measuring the Audience Growth Rate for top competitors will highlight what speed is realistic for your industry and help determine if you’re effectively growing your audience.

If you’re just joining us for the Beginner’s Guide to Social Media Metrics, catch up with our breakdown of mentions, sentiment, reach and exposure, engagement and Share of Voice. Stay tuned tomorrow when we’ll break down influence.

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