Understanding Social Media Goals and Metrics

Episode 3

Show notes

We've been working on a few projects lately that has got us talking about social media metrics and goals, and how to know whether you've got a successful campaign on your hands. 

For more information and resources, check out the full post below.

Show highlights:

• How to create campaign content and experimenting with content
• Establishing goals for your campaign and what to look for
• Understanding why growing your followers isn't exactly the most important metric 
• 3 social media campaign tips that you can implement right now 

Got questions? 

We want to hear from you! If you have any questions about this episode, email us: podcast@bam.com.au or tweet us @bamcreative.

Social Media Goals & Metrics

Due to the myriad of metrics available for social media and a general confusion over what they all mean, there is a tendency to move the goal post and change the goal metrics of any campaign, which causes confusion in understanding the success of a campaign. You could easily change your focus on the initial metrics to any kind of metrics, to be able to make a social media campaign “successful”.

Social media is an excellent tool for building your brand awareness and connecting directly with your target audiences, but how do you know you’re creating effective campaigns that lead to conversions, and eventually, sales? Here, we break down what you need to do to stay focused, and ensure you’re clearly setting your social media goals.

Establishing your business goals

Before embarking on a social media campaign, it’s worth going back to your business plan and reaffirming your business goals. This will ensure that any content and campaigns you create will be clearly defined and reduce any confusion when measuring the success of a campaign.

It’s also worth doing a quick branding exercise or establishing a digital strategy for each platform, leading back to your brand. This ensures that you’re creating targeted and consistent messaging across all your content on your chosen platforms.

The goals of using social media as another platform to connect with your target audience, isn’t much different than traditional marketing. When broken down, the goals are:

1. To increase brand awareness
2. To increase conversions and leads  
3. To increase sales

Ultimately, every goal trickles down and eventually leads to sales.

Creating campaign content

Social media campaigns should be part of your overall social media strategy, meaning that not every post should be asking for clicks and asking for sales. They should be carefully crafted to give your targeted audience enough value for them to want to click through and send the wheels in motion.

One of the popular strategies for building brand awareness is to provide information that increases your position as a thought leader in your industry. This won’t particularly lead to sales, but it certainly creates and builds the connection between you and your audience because it empowers them.

To do this, you need to understand your target audience and the platforms that they engage with. We like to create a audience persona to ensure that every campaign message is speaking directly to that target each and every time. We’ll talk more about this in the next episode.

But when it comes to the exact strategy, our best piece of advice is to go for it because you will only ever learn by doing and experimenting with what works and what doesn’t. As mentioned on the show, a really awesome example of a piece of organic content is the tradie doing a bit of a dance before heading up a ladder. Due to the popularity of the video, it became a sponsored post which drove a significant number of leads.

Ultimately, whatever it is that you ask you’re asking your audience to do, make sure it’s clear. For example, if you’ve set up an ad on Facebook and you’re asking your audience to click through to a landing page, make this clear. Once they get to the landing page, be very clear about what it is you need them to do to get their value such as: Fill out the contact form for your brochure.

Establishing goals for your campaign

Before embarking on a campaign, there are a number of significant goals that are available for you to track, depending on the platform of your campaign. These goals are related to leads and sales.

• Clicks through to the campaign landing page
• Share of traffic - what % of traffic can be attributed to the social media campaign?
• Time spent on the landing page - this is important to know because it may be that traffic is heading to your landing page,  but they may be leaving quickly or even staying for a while and not converting.
• Bounce rate - the rate that people are leaving the page
• Conversions - some examples are listed below
  • Contact form filled out (correctly)
  • Brochure download
  • Newsletter subscription
  • Filling out details in a lead generation ad on Facebook
  • Directly contacting you through a Facebook Messenger campaign
  • Engaging with a chatbot on your website
  • Calling a unique phone number

These metrics can be tracked with various tools. If money is a factor, we highly recommend sticking with Google Analytics as it’s easy to set up and with the use of Google Tag Manager, track various goals.

Secondary to these goals are the general social media metrics that will help you determine the success of a campaign post. This data can help you to make changes to the post or to influence a future campaign:

• Likes: how many people liked the post
• Shares: how many people shared the post
• Impressions: how many people saw your post
• Engagement: total interaction on a post

Wait! Isn’t growing followers the number one goal (of all time)?

It’s always exciting to watch the number of followers increase, but it should never be the sole metric to measure the success of a campaign. It is unlikely that an increase in followers means an increase in sales, because the journey that the follower is on may be quite far away from actually purchasing from you or engaging with you.

With ever-changing algorithms, and the chance that your chosen social media platform could change in an instant, it’s difficult to know whether you are reaching and connecting with your followers. Of course, it certainly helps your reach if you have more followers, but it certainly shouldn’t equal sales.

One of the most significant reasons is that you’re unable to collect any data from that follower to build your database. This means that you have a limited ability to get in touch with them in hopes of leading to a conversion.

This is why we are reluctant to recommend Like campaigns for Facebook, for example. The cost of creating and running a Like campaign may cost you more than creating a targeted message for your audience and boosting a post, which has the higher possibility of generating leads. 

3 tips for your social media campaign

Here are 3 tips you can implement for any of your social media campaign right now.

1. Campaigns should match your goals

Take the time to ensure your posts are going to be helping your business connect with your target audience, to increase brand awareness, leads and sales. The aim of a campaign should be to lower the cost of acquisition each and every time.

2. Understand your market

Understanding your brand and who it is in relation to your market, will not only help you create a tailored message but also reach that audience on their engaged platform.

Josh mentioned the Golden Triangle of Marketing (Message, Market & Media) during the episode, created by Dan Kennedy. You can read more about the power of the right message here.

3. Track enquiries

Tracking enquiries from any campaign from any platform, will help you protect your money. For example, if you’re currently engaging Facebook and Instagram, but you’re getting more enquiries through Instagram, the data from your enquiries will help you make that decision to put more money into Instagram.