From “Likes” to Real Business

Tracking The Right Social Media Metrics?

Today, consumers spend over 6.5 hours on social media — that’s where the attention truly is. While social media marketing often means spending heavily on ads, the real value lies in organic social media.

Unfortunately, 95% of brands struggle to crack it, often focusing only on follower count instead of real engagement.

There are two types of social media marketing that brands use:

1. Organic Social Media:  This is the content you post without paying for reach — like regular posts, reels, stories, or tweets. It helps build a real connection with your audience over time. Success here depends on great content, consistency, and engagement.

2. Paid Social Media: This includes ads and promoted posts that you run ads on Meta/ Tik tok for. It helps you reach a wider audience quickly and drive traffic or sales. But once you stop spending, the reach usually drops.

While it’s easy to spend money on paid ads, relying only on that often leads to poor marketing efficiency. To succeed in both paid and organic, great content is the key.

Digital-native, founder-led brands have shown how powerful this approach can be — they’ve built high traction purely through smart, consistent content.

This is where the right content strategy and measurement framework come in. One that’s built not just for reach, but for results.

Here are a few brands that have done exceptionally well with organic social media:

5 Brands That Inspire Us With Their Organic Social Media Game

Cracking organic social media is no easy task — but these brands have done it brilliantly. They’ve built strong communities, created content that truly connects, and driven growth without relying heavily on paid ads.

• Nykaa: Built a loyal audience through beauty tips, tutorials, and influencer collaborations. Their content feels personal and relatable.

• boAt: Focused on youth culture, music, and lifestyle — their content is fun, high-energy, and highly shareable.

• The Souled Store: Mastered memes, pop culture, and community engagement. They make followers feel like part of the brand.

• Zomato: Turned everyday updates into viral, witty content. They’ve made food conversations fun and engaging.

• Mamaearth: Used founder-led storytelling and educational content to build trust and authenticity in a crowded market.

These brands show that with the right voice, consistency, and creativity — organic social media can be your strongest growth engine.

Some brands that were born in the TV era have tried to repurpose their old content for social media. While that can work to some extent, today’s platforms demand fresh thinking and content that’s made for digital, not just adapted to it.

This is where AI can be a powerful tool — helping brands create, scale, and personalize content faster than ever.

At the core of all this is content marketing. It’s not just about selling — it’s about telling stories, solving problems, and building trust. Whether you’re running organic posts or paid campaigns, content is what keeps your audience coming back.

Why Content Marketing Still Wins?

At the heart of every strong social media strategy is content marketing. It’s not just about promoting products — it’s about creating content that tells a story, solves a problem, or builds trust with your audience.

Great content makes people stop, listen, and engage. Whether you're doing organic posts or running ads, it’s the quality of your content that brings people back and turns them into loyal customers.

In the end, content is the real engine behind lasting growth.

Steps to Drive Business Impact through Analytics

While there is no one-size-fits-all approach, there are three foundational steps to drive business impact from Social media.

Step 1: Install a Social Media Analytics Framework

It is important to begin by stating your objectives that make clear what you want to achieve with your social media marketing strategy. It is no mystery that marketing can help one achieve multiple goals:

• be it raising brand awareness,

• providing social proof or conducting product launch campaigns and demonstrations (unboxing videos, apparel and fits pictures etc.),

• providing a community and platform for customer advocacy,

• and finally to drive up business sales.

Once you have selected your goal the foundation is set for the entire framework and guides the data collection process. But this shift doesn’t happen automatically. It begins with intent and alignment.

Step 2: Identify KPIs and align them with your business strategy

Key Performance Indicators or KPIs are numbers that help determine whether a strategy is working. A single KPI is never enough to tell the whole story, but instead we require a combination of several to understand whether our campaign is nearing its objective. To drive business impact we look at KPIs that are related to business performance.

Align the right KPIs to the objective and keep to gauge the effectiveness of your strategies. E.g. measuring the traffic generated to your website from an influencer’s post on Instagram and the conversion rate of these users.

Additionally, define a percentage of the budget that goes into each piece of content that forms part of the campaign and measure it. The KPI will help you understand the ROI as per your target.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of major KPIs that marketers track:

Step 3: Experiment and Measure the Impact of Each Campaign

To measure the impact of the campaign, you must define benchmarks. Benchmarks are the targets you define upfront, tailored to your specific campaign goals, budget, and industry. They could be a 10% boost in brand awareness, a 5% conversion rate, or even a 3x return on investment.

Supposing you fall short of a target, it is an opportunity to reassess and examine the campaign and understand the reasons behind it. Powerful insights can be drawn when compared to competition benchmarks.

Measuring the impact of your social media marketing campaign isn’t a one-shot deal. Think of it as a continuous feedback loop. Regularly monitor data, analyze the insights, and make adjustments.

Role of Analytics in social media marketing

Analytics is central to digital and social media marketing and provides numerous benefits. Data-driven organisations perform 23 times better at customer acquisition, 19 times more likely to stay profitable and almost 7 times more likely to retain customers. (Source: Forbes)

• Measuring and analyzing social media performance is crucial for optimizing campaigns and maximizing ROI. Social media analytics provide businesses with insights into how their campaigns are performing, what content is resonating with their audience, and where they can improve.

• Social media analytics also provide businesses with insights into their audience demographics, interests, and behaviours. This information can be used to target marketing campaigns more effectively and create content that is more likely to resonate with the target audience.

• Tracking competitor activity on social media can help identify trends and opportunities for differentiation. By understanding what the competitors are doing, businesses can stay ahead of the curve and develop unique and effective strategies.

Common ways social media metrics can be faked

Vanity metrics like followers, likes, and comments can be bought quite easily on the internet, and brands shouldn’t rely too much on them at face value. We must also be cautious when looking at metrics, as there are some ways of skewing the numbers that do not represent actual business impact and are misleading.

• Driving Giveaway Campaign: This involves a business or individual offering free prizes to social media users or subscribers to win in exchange for engagement-related activities like commenting, tagging other users, or sharing a particular post, story, or video.

• Running Performance Marketing Campaigns: Businesses or individuals employ paid performance marketing for the specific purpose of increasing the number of followers their page or profile has.

• Paid Followers: Purchasing followers has become an all too common way to drive up the follower count, which goes to show that follower counts can often be misleading, and our focus should always be on Business Impact KPIs. Read about Click Farming over here.

  
  

Conclusion

Social media’s massive reach, high engagement, and growing advertising spending make it an essential platform for brands. By leveraging social media analytics, brands can maximise the returns on spend, experiment with content and format, uncover new insights about consumer behavior, and keep refining strategies. And the brands (and leaders) that understand this — win.

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