What is utm_medium=social?

Who adds it

Social scheduling tools and marketers add it to links in posts. Buffer sets utm_medium=social by default when campaign tracking is on.

What it means

Someone clicked a link in an unpaid social post. GA4 puts it in Organic Social, along with social-network, social-media, sm and similar spellings.

What to do with it

Use it for organic posts and a paid value for ads, so the two don't mix in reports.

How Vireo shows it

Vireo Pro's UTM campaigns card lists tagged visits by Source, Medium and Campaign, with visitors and pageviews. The tags are read from the first page of each visit, and the same tags feed revenue by source.

In the free plugin, Vireo drops the query string from page addresses, keeping only a few WordPress ones such as p and page_id, so a tagged URL counts as the same page as the untagged one. The visit is counted under the referrer it arrived with.

UTM campaigns are part of Vireo Pro. See UTM campaigns in the docs.

Sources

Organic Social Source matches a regex list of social sites OR Medium is one of (“social”, “social-network”, “social-media”, “sm”, “social network”, “social media”)

Default channel group - Analytics Help

Campaign Name: buffer Campaign Source: x.com or twitter.com / facebook.com / linkedin.com / bufferapp.com Campaign Medium: social

Understanding UTM parameters and Google Analytics - Buffer Help Center