Social Media Goals | Social Media Marketing Goals and Strategies

Social media isn’t only a marketing tool, it can affect almost every area of a business. Social media is a key channel for brand awareness, engagement, lead generation, customer support and it can boost your search engine rankings. Many search engines, such as Google, consider a company’s social media presence as a factor in determining where that business will rank on a search results page.

Create SMART Social Media Goals

One common goal-setting technique is to be SMART. This can be an excellent guideline for creating goals that work for your company.

SMART is an acronym for:

Specific: Your goals should be clear, simple and defined.
Measurable: This is where analytics come in. You want a goal that has one or more metrics.
Achievable: Is it achievable or is it not possible within your resources?
Realistic: With your current resources of time and money, is it possible to achieve your goals?
Time sensitive: Every goal needs a time frame, whether it’s one year or several months.

In defining your social media goals, start with the broad goals that you’d like to achieve over a year.

Some common, broad goals include:

Increase brand awareness — Follower count for your social media profiles, reach of your posts, mentions, shares, and retweets
Increased brand recognition – Social media helps boost your business’ visibility with both current customers and potential prospects, and gives you a direct way to share your brand’s voice and content with them.
Drive traffic to your website — Referral traffic from social media, share of overall traffic, bounce rate of traffic, and clicks on your posts
Generate new leads — New leads collected through social media, downloads of your gated content, clicks on your lead-gen posts, and conversion rate of leads from social media
Grow revenue — Signups, sales revenue, or revenue from social ads
Boost brand engagement — Likes, shares, comments per post, mentions, and replies
Build a community around your business — Number of posts, likes, and comments for Facebook groups. Number of participants and tweets per participant for Twitter chats. Number of daily active users for Slack communities
Increase mentions in the press — Potential reach, shares and mentions, influencers talking about your content, and number of people reaching out to ask about industry-related questions
Research and learn about your customers — Number of conversations with customers on social media, suggestions or feedback, and product/content improvements made from those suggestions

Steps to success

Be consistent: Be consistent when it comes to your posts, your message and how frequently you use social media. It is truly the key to success with any social media campaign. Make a plan for what you’re going to post and how often you’re going to post, and stick with it.

Maintain your presence on all main social media channels: If you want to be successful, then you need to post across all networks. It is essential to maintain your presence on all the big media sites, including Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.

Choose your audience: Identify your ideal customer. Know your target audience, age, occupation, passions, motives, income, etc. This will help you to determine which social media accounts, brands or businesses you want to target and what your goal for targeting them is.

Track & Measure Your Goals: Once you’ve defined your goals, the next step is to track them. The easiest way to track your goals is by using Google Analytics. From your Google Analytics dashboard, go to Acquisition > Social > Conversions.