Setting social media goals is a critical step in improving the value of your social media network. One of the greatest values of your social media network is building familiarity with potential customers through multiple posts so that they grow to know and like you. To increase your chances of success, you should regularly write down, measure, and report your goals.

Without specific social media marketing goals, you likely will not know if your efforts are effective. These goals will help you strategize for improvement and success. They are documented methods to provide purpose and direction, and they are easily shared with others.

There are a few steps to set your social media goals: first, conduct a social media audit; second, decide what is important; and third, choose your goal setting framework.

The Audit

It is essential to know where you are before you start thinking about where you want to be. Doing this requires a clear understanding of where your social media network is presently. To do this, you need to conduct a social media audit. This audit will help you record all your social media accounts and campaigns in place for your current performance, which can be used as a baseline.

To perform a social media audit:

• Find all your social media accounts
  • Do an internet search for your company name
  • Perform a search for each of the major social media platforms of your company name
• Ensure that each account is complete and on-brand
• Find your posts
• Evaluate the performance of each channel
• Compare results over time
• Calculate your return on investment (ROI)
• Know your audience in each network
• Figure out which networks are best for you
• Repeat

What is Important?

Once you have finished your audit, analyze the data. You will see the social channels that are performing well and those that are underperforming. You may also find you need to change direction with some of them.

Start to consider what is profoundly vital to achieving your social media goals. While it is a matter of pride to have a lot of followers, how important are they if they never do business with you? These are called vanity metrics. Is there a way to tie these directly to your business goal? While it is possible, now is the time to think about this.

Look for ways to better align your social media strategy with your business plan. Once you figure out what kind of improvement or growth you need to help your business, it is easier to start setting some specific social media marketing goals.

Establishing a Framework

It is easy to state goals that do not have any basis in reality, but this will not improve business results. The plans need to be realistic, trackable and tied to key business objectives.

The S.M.A.R.T. Goal Framework

The S.M.A.R.T goal framework is all about creating relevant, achievable goals that help support your overall business objectives.

The acronym stands for:

• Specific: simple, sensible, and significant
  • Your goal must be clear and specific, or else you will not be able to focus your efforts or feel truly motivated to achieve it.
  • Does “increase engagement” mean you want ten new followers or 10,000? Making your social media goals simple, sensible, and significant makes tracking progress and measuring successes easier.
• Measurable: meaningful, motivating
  • It is important to have measurable goals. This allows you to track progress, stay focused, and meet deadlines.
  • Every goal needs some kind of metric. “Improve customer service” is a great concept, but it is very vague. However, without a metric, it is not a goal.
• Achievable: agreed, attainable
  • Your goal needs to be realistic and attainable to be successful.
  • Your social media goals should absolutely require you to stretch, but they should be within reach if you put in the necessary work.
• Relevant: reasonable, realistic, resourced, and results-based
  • Make sure that goal is important to you and is aligned with other goals you have.
  • This is the piece that ties your goal setting back to broader business objectives. If your goal involves increasing Facebook likes or retweets, ensure that aligns with your business goals.
• Timely: time-based, time-limited, time/cost limited, timely, time-sensitive
  • Every goal needs a target date.
  • Deadlines keep everyone accountable. Include an end date for completing your goal, so you know when to check in on your success. The idea is that effective goals embody all these qualities.

The Metrics

While setting up your goals, you need to always keep in mind what you are looking to achieve. Here are some of the more popular metrics used in measuring social media success:

Brand awareness indicates how many people on social media are aware of you and your products and services.
Some metrics you can use to measure brand awareness are:

• Brand mentions
• Shares
• Likes
• Impressions
• Post reach

Manage brand reputation, whether it is about popularity and customer satisfaction or industry and customer perception.
Some metrics for brand reputation include:

• • Customer satisfaction score
  • Likes
  • Social sentiment

Build and manage an engaged community of followers who want to hear about your company’s latest developments.
Some metrics to follow are:

• Audience growth rate
• Engagement rate
• Click-through rate
• Bounce rate
• Net promoter score

Increase your conversions and sales because this relates directly to your revenue stream.
Some metrics to follow are:

• Conversion rate
• Click-through rate
• Bounce rate
• Cost per click

Social media is a powerful market research tool to help you gain customer and market insights.
This can be used for building personas

It is highly unlikely you will make a sale the first time a potential customer sees your posts. However, it can be used to identify and nurture leads.
Some metrics to follow are:
Conversion rate
Lead generation

These are only a few examples you can use to set goals for your social media marketing. Plan carefully, make changes as needed, and measure the results–and thrive.

Raine Digital can help you identify your goals to help your business grow. Reach out to us today!