The social media metrics you pay attention to will ultimately depend on your industry, business objectives and social media strategy. However, there are some metrics that are universally less relevant to businesses and marketers. Isolated or “vanity” metrics: metrics such as follower count and impressions can look impressive (or disheartening), but without further context, they aren’t that meaningful. Looking at follower growth or patterns between impressions and engagement (i.e. engagement rate) would be more useful. Equally, it’s important to look at social media metrics in the wider context of your marketing funnel—you might get fantastic post engagement, but if your content isn’t generating actual website traffic or leads, perhaps you need to revisit your strategy.Volume of posts: to some extent, it’s helpful to keep track of how much you or your competitors are posting, and how this contributes to performance—after all, consistency is key to social media marketing success.However, the quantity of your posts is less important than the quality of your posts. Post analytics, like reach and engagement, matter much more.Time spent on social media: data on audience demographics and behavior should play an essential role in your strategy, informing the kind of content you create, ad targeting, and how you interact with your followers. But the amount of time users spend on social media platforms is not something you need to keep track of (unless, of course, there is a macro-level trend that causes people to abandon a platform). Algorithm data: understanding how the algorithm works is a mystery that preoccupies lots of marketers and business owners. Yet social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram or Tik Tok rarely make algorithm data transparently or readily available, so it’s not worth dwelling on this too much. Your time would be better spent tracking and analyzing your own metrics, rather than trying to crack the code. In summary, the best thing you can do is to focus on metrics that are contextual and actionable, rather than raw data or vanity metrics that don’t add to the story you need to tell around your social media marketing.