15 Social KPIs Every App Should Be Tracking

If you google „Social Network KPIs“, you will get millions of links targeted mostly at social media managers and marketers. These resources provide a wide range of information to engage their users in platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and information on how to transform their communities into customers.

Nonetheless, there are very few resources that target app developers and provide information on important KPIs that need to be tracked internally to understand the impact of social features on their app and take advantage of their benefits.

Social features provide a complete new level of insights for developers, that can help them tailor their products according to their users' needs, boost retention and make sure engagement is maximized. In this post we have created a list of the most important social KPIs for apps, in order to understand virality, user engagement and make sure you collect the right data to improve your product.

Likes

1. Likes per Post

This KPI will help you rank the user generated posts and understand which of them are most popular among your users.

2. Likes by Content Type

Such a split gives you an understanding of which content users like the most. If a user likes more content of type “football� and less of type “politics�, you’ll be in a better position to personalize the feed accordingly.

Connections

3. Connections per User

The average number of connections per user, will tell you how connected your network is and also will help you identify the most influential users, that can help you grow your graph.

4. Followers-to-following Ratio

This will help you have a cleaner way of identifying your influencers other than just using the number of people following them. The more followers and the higher this ratio, the more influential the user.

News Feed Engagement

5. Scrolled length

This will tell you how much your users are consuming the content of your news feed directly from that screen. A fundamental KPI to predict ad impressions in your feed and choose the right position for your ad placements.

6. Time Spent on Post

, that they will be factoring in the time you spent on stories to rank content in the news feed. If you understand, which type of posts and stories your users are spending more time with, you’ll be able to achieve better personalization.

User Interactions

7. Connection Weight

This is a more advanced KPI that allows you to understand the connections between your users. For each user for each connection, you can calculate a value that will tell you how strong the connection is. You can include profile views, connection date or 1-to-1 interactions. For instance if user A looks at user B’s profile 10 times more than at user C’s, then his connection weight with B will be substantially higher.

Invites

8. Invites per User

If your users are not inviting their friends you won't have organic growth. Invites per users will help you understand first, if your users are inviting and second, which users are doing so.

9. Platform Split

Understand which platform your users are inviting their friends through and promote it better than the others.

10. Invites Conversion

Make sure you know what is the conversion of the invites sent by your users. With deep linking, now you can personalize onboarding and improve the invitation funnel to increase this conversion.

Comments

11. Comments per Post

Will help you understand which posts enhance discussions among your users and tailor the news feed accordingly.

12. Comment Sentiment

Understanding the sentiment (e.g negative, neutral, positive) of the users comments will give you more insights on how they view or prefer certain content.

Social Login

13.Onboarding Conversion by Platform

Social logins improve your singup conversion. Understanding which platform (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) has the highest share on your login, will allow you to push that platform to increase the onboarding conversion. It will also help you understand which from these platforms.

Outbound Shares

14. Shares by Platform

Splitting the shares to other social media platforms will tell you which channel you should optimize to increase your virality.

15. Shares by Content Type

Splitting the shares by content type will tell you which type of content is more likely to improve your virality.

Whether you have a social app or are planning to go become one, it is important to understand how the data you generate from social features, will help you create more actionable insights and increase personalization.

Make sure what you are tracking serves your goals too. Don’t get dragged into vanity metrics like downloads or monthly active users to measure the success of your social features. Collect what matters and don’t overengineer your analytics.