10 Social Media Goals to Track
Social media is one interesting world to be in right now, not just for all the drama that goes on there but also for the fun parts too. Running a personal social media account is quite different from running a social media account for a brand because there’s really no face to pin to the account. However, by using social media to show the personality of the brand through various creative fun and engaging content, brands can use social media too to connect to their target audiences in a more relaxed environment that social media creates.
Whether you are indirectly marketing the brand on social media or you are undertaking direct marketing by running various campaigns on social media, it is important to always keep track of certain metrics. This can help you know if the brand is making any progress or not. Depending on what your brand’s goals are for using social media, you will have to track social media metrics relevant to that goal.
If you would like create and track social media goals for your brand, it would be wise to seek the assistance of a social media marketing agency for help in this regard. Otherwise, consider these 10 social media goals to track.
1. Top referrers to the website
Knowing the sources that are driving the most traffic to the website is an essential metric to track. This can further reveal if the brand’s social media channels are really of benefit to the brand. Social media platforms like Tumblr, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter allow you to share external links on their platforms. These social media platforms should be amongst the top referring traffic source for your website.
2. User-generated content
User-generated content can be images, videos or ordinary text but they are very good metrics to track when trying to measure the impact of the brand. These user-generated content are like subtle positive reviews or feedbacks that the brand can use to reaffirm that it is on the right path. This is usually in terms of the value added through the product or service. They can also be used to market to others by sharing such content on social media too or simply using it to run campaigns on social media.
3. Number of mentions, retweets, reshares or reposts
The more relevant the brand’s posts on social media are, the more attention they will receive and people will engage with their content more. This is done by mentioning the brand, retweeting or resharing the brand’s posts on their own timeline or feed, which automatically gives the brand more brand exposure and brand awareness.
4. Number of followers
This is one quick way to know that people on social media are finding your content on social media relevant, in addition to retweets or reposts They would want to follow the brand’s social account so that they can keep getting relevant updates from them. Also for the business, an increase in the number of followers also gives the brand more opportunities to market itself to more followers through their content.
5. Number of likes
Engagement is a very good metric to track for social media, irrespective of the industry of the business. A simple like on any content that the brand pushes out can positively impact the organisation’s visibility on the feed of the user that liked the post as well as users who follow that same user (more like a positive chain reaction).
6. Number of comments
As mentioned earlier, engagement is very key to the success of any brand’s social media presence. And getting people to comment on posts shared can really boost the business’ social media presence which equally boosts brand awareness and brand visibility. Then in cases where a brand has users who regularly drop some comments on their post, this simply suggests that the organisation is secretly building an army of people loyal to the brand. These growing loyal users can eventually become the foot soldiers that the business needs to get the word out about anything they are doing, with or without paid campaigns running.
7. Number of views
Brands that post a lot of video or audiovisual content should always track the number of views on each content. Going beyond the impression of the video to finding out the actual number of people that viewed the content can help brands know the impact of the content. Businesses can also dig deeper into getting the exact number of persons that saw the content, by tracking the reach of the video rather than impression.
8. Number of email sign ups
If the goal is to get more relevant traffic from the brand’s social media platforms to the website to secure some leads. Then this would be a good metric to track in addition to tracking the referring sources (just to be certain that the people sign up for email newsletters are from social media). Businesses can frequently share links to email sign up on social media often. Brands can use collected emails while abiding by the policies of GDPR, to either market to subscribers or collect more useful information later to tailor marketing to each subscriber.
9. Number of clicks on the website
Businesses using social media to drive traffic to their website should also be keen on checking other things that visitors do on their websites asides reading the content that safely took them away from social media to the brand’s website. If the post you direct your social media audience to is well-linked but people are not clicking on it, then this should signal to you that something is not right with the content or how it was displayed. The more clicks a brand gets on the website means that visitors find the content relevant enough and are willing to go to other pages of the website to find more relevant content on their own. This automatically increases the page views on the website, reduces bounce rate and increase the average time spent on the website.
10. Activities on landing pages
Brands that use a specific landing page or pages for their various digital marketing campaign (on social media) need to be able to track the various activities on the landing page. Landing pages are very crucial to the success of any digital marketing campaign – that’s why a lot of resources goes into creating the best landing pages that could generate more leads and conversions.