Most Important Social Media Goals and Metrics

6 October 20, 2020

When it comes to planning your social media strategy, knowing your goals and how to measure them is a critical step for success. 

Today we’re looking at 5 main goals. If they seem familiar, you might have seen similar ones used for measuring content marketing success. Good memory! However, they are not identical and are measured differently. 

Here are 5 goals you can include in your social marketing campaigns:

  1. Improving Brand Awareness
  2. Growing Website Traffic 
  3. Generating New Leads
  4. Increasing Sales 
  5. Increasing Community Engagement

Improving Brand Awareness

Building brand awareness is a general goal that focuses on increasing recognition by customers or an audience. Basically, it’s about leaving an impression, and a good one at that.

Brand awareness is especially important for small businesses or new brands. After all, a customer can’t make purchases if they don’t even know something exists.

Metrics for Brand Awareness

Brand awareness on social media revolves around your reach, which can be measured through the following factors:

  • Increase in follower count,
  • Number of impressions per post,
  • Share of voice
    • Number of mentions or @’s
    • Shares and Traffic for keywords and hashtags

Growing Website Traffic

If you own a blog or e-commerce site, you might want to use social media to get more visitors to your page. It is a great way to increase publicity for your site; many businesses and influencers make use of a “link in bio” reminder in their posts to direct traffic.

Metrics for Website Traffic

If you’ve implemented a link to your website on social media, you will need to start measuring the results and determining exactly where the traffic is coming from. Look at:

  • Changes in traffic coming from social pages,
    • Percentage of total traffic from social media,
  • Number of sign-ups (to a newsletter for example) from social media

Generating New Leads

Sometimes a sales process is more complicated and cannot be easily completed through a single transaction. If a process requires negotiations and advice, such as B2B enterprise software or enrolling in a school program, it often begins as a lead.

If you have a business in a similar product or service, social media is useful in bringing in potential clients for follow-up.

This can be accomplished through call-to-actions like gated content, where you might ask a potential customer to leave their contact details for a free trial or downloadable.

Metrics for New Lead Generation

See how your call-to-actions are working with the following metrics:

  • Number of Sign-Ups,
  • Clicks on call-to-action posts,
  • Lead Conversion Rate,
  • Number of downloads of content ie. non-revenue conversions

Increasing Sales

As you may have seen on platforms like Instagram, it is possible to grow sales directly on social media for products with a simple decision-making process. Instagram shopping makes it easy for customers to purchase whilst exploring their social feeds and accounts. These include consumer products like makeup or food.

Metrics for Growing Sales

The metric for sales from your social media pages is quite clear-cut, it’s revenue!

However, it’s a good idea to combine this with other goals too as they often impact one another – increasing brand awareness can often result in increased sales.

Increasing Community Engagement

There’s no point in having a huge following if they don’t see or interact with your content. Posts that are picked to be featured on social media feeds by an algorithm, and it favors posts that have more engagements such as likes, comments, and saves.

If you have a decent following on social media but feel like your content is not getting seen, it might be time to look at improving community engagement.

Metrics for Community Engagement

You’re looking for well, engagement. Keep an eye on:

  • Clicks,
  • Shares,
  • Comments,
  • Mentions.

Likes are also a form of engagement but sites like Facebook have hidden this for business accounts as its considered a vanity measure, so focus on the engagements which you can track. They are often more meaningful too!

You might have noticed overlapping metrics across different goals, and this is normal. Goals with similar metrics are often complementary and can be included together in your overall social media strategy.

Now that you know what metrics to use, explore some tools that will help you analyze your social media metrics.