Social media has become an important tool for brands to engage with their audiences, build brand loyalty and drive business growth. However, successfully navigating a social media environment requires a strategic approach with clearly defined goals. In this blog post, we’ll explore key social media goals, define nine common social media marketing goals, discuss how to track them, and provide insight into key metrics for each goal.
What are Social Media Goals?
Social media goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound objectives that guide the strategic efforts of individuals or brands on social media platforms. These goals serve as a roadmap for leveraging social media to achieve desired outcomes. The specificity of social media goals ensures clarity in objectives, avoiding vague aspirations. Measurability allows for the tracking of key performance indicators (KPIs) to assess progress and success. Achievability ensures that goals are realistic within available resources, preventing the setting of unattainable targets.
Social media goals encompass a range of objectives, including building brand awareness, driving website traffic, generating leads, fostering engagement, providing customer service, managing reputation, and directly contributing to sales and revenue. These goals play a crucial role in shaping a purposeful and impactful social media strategy, driving success in the dynamic digital landscape.
8 Common Social Media Marketing Goals and How to Track Them:
1. Increasing Brand Awareness:
The main objective is to spread the brand’s reach and recognition among the target audience. Create engaging and shareable content that aligns with the brand’s identity, leverage partnerships with influencers, and invest in paid advertising to increase brand visibility on social media platforms.
Key Metrics to Follow:
- Follower Growth: Gaining new followers means your brand’s reach is expanding across social media channels. Be careful on the number of followers on the forums.
- Reach and Impressions: This shows how many people see your content in their feed. Bigger numbers mean more eyes on your brand.
- Share of Voice: Look at the amount of conversations in your industry about the brand on social media. You should track the percentage of total social mentions for broad industry keywords that your brand generates.
2. Driving Website Traffic:
Direct social media followers to the brand’s website or other online assets. Share compelling content that includes clear calls-to-action, use link-tracking tools to monitor click-through rates, and promote website-exclusive offers or content to incentivize visits.
Key Metrics to Follow:
- Social Referral Traffic: Use Google Analytics to track how many of your website visitors come directly to your site from various social platforms within a certain period of time.
- Click-through rate: The percentage of users who click on a link in a social media post. High click-through rate means strong social media copy and landing pages.
- Traffic Quality: The relevance and engagement level of the traffic driven to the website from social media. Tracking the visitor behavior, such as time spent, page visited, content downloaded tells you the quality of traffic your post has generated.
3. Driving Revenue Growth:
Increasing sales and revenue directly attributed to social media efforts. Implement e-commerce features on social platforms, track conversion rates for social media-driven sales, and run targeted promotional campaigns that encourage followers to make purchases.
Key Metrics to Follow:
- Sales Attributed to Social Media: The revenue generated directly from social media marketing efforts. Using codes to track the number of people who have clicked to reach a sales landing page and make a purchase.
- Click-through rate: See who clicked on a link from your social media posts and took the action you wanted, whether it turned into a purchase or not.
- Bounce Rate: The percentage of visitors who navigate away from the website after viewing only one page.
4. Generating Social Media Leads:
Acquire potential customers’ information or encouraging them to express interest in products or services. Utilize lead generation forms, offer exclusive content or promotions in exchange for user information, and employ compelling visuals and messaging to attract leads.
Key Metrics to Follow:
- Number of Downloads: The total downloads of resources or content offered in exchange for user information.
- Lead Quality Score: An assessment of the potential value of leads generated through social media efforts to determine how likely they are to convert.
5. Boosting Brand Engagement:
Foster interactions, comments, likes, shares, and clicks to build a vibrant and engaged community. Create interactive and shareable content, actively respond to comments, run contests or polls, and collaborate with influencers to increase engagement metrics.
Key Metrics to Follow:
- Likes, Comments, and Shares: These are the most common ways to communicate on any platform. They show how well your words affected the audience.
- Clicks: When a social media user clicks on a link in your post, it means they read your content and are prompted to take the next step to click.
- Engagement rate: You can accurately determine engagement rate by dividing the total number of links on a post by the number of followers who saw the post.
6. Community Building and Management:
Develop and maintain a loyal and active community around the brand on social media. Encourage user-generated content, initiate discussions, host events or live sessions, and track metrics such as community growth, engagement, and conversion rates.
Key Metrics to Follow:
- Community Growth and churn: The rate at which the community expands and stays in your content over time indicates how well your community is growing.
- Community engagement: Measure existing community interactions, such as original posts, as well as content, likes, shares and more.
7. Enhancing Social Media Customer Service:
Provide timely and effective customer support through social media channels. Monitor social media platforms for customer inquiries, respond promptly and professionally, use chatbots for immediate assistance, and measure response time and customer satisfaction scores.
Key Metrics to Follow:
- Response Time: Monitor the timing of the messages you receive to see how quickly your team responds to customer questions or complaints on social media.
- Resolution Time: The time taken to resolve customer issues or queries.
- Customer Satisfaction Score: Collect feedback or customer satisfaction on the support received on social media and prepare a score based on it. It is an aggregate measure of customer happiness with the provided service.
8. Driving Social Media Traffic:
Encourage users to share and engage with the brand’s content, thus expanding its reach. Create shareable content, use branded hashtags, and incentivize sharing through contests or user-generated content campaigns. Track metrics such as share of voice, brand mentions, and hashtag performance to measure success.
Key Metrics to Follow:
- Hashtag Performance: Evaluation of engagement and reach associated with branded or campaign-specific hashtags.
- Engagement Metrics: Measuring user interactions, clicks, and overall engagement with shared content.
How to Set SMART Social Media Goals:
Setting SMART goals ensures a focused and effective social media strategy. These goals are an integral part of a strategic social media marketing plan, helping businesses and individuals navigate the complex and ever-evolving landscape of social media to achieve desired outcomes. Here’s how to do it:
Specific:
A specific goal within a social media context should leave no room for ambiguity, clearly outlining the desired outcome, its relevance, and the involved stakeholders. It involves breaking down overarching aspirations into identifiable components, setting quantifiable criteria for measurement, and maintaining a focused scope.
By articulating specific goals, such as increasing engagement on a particular platform or targeting a defined percentage growth in follower count, organizations ensure that their social media efforts are directed towards a well-defined target, fostering strategic planning and effective execution. Specificity in social media goals ultimately serves as the foundation for a successful and purpose-driven digital marketing strategy.
Measurable:
Measurable goals are those that can be expressed in concrete terms, usually in terms of numerical metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs). By establishing clear and specific metrics, organizations can measure the effectiveness of their social media strategies and campaigns. Measurable social media goals can include tracking metrics such as follower growth, click-through rate, engagement level, or conversion rate.
This quantitative emphasis enables businesses to transparently analyze the impact of their efforts, make informed decisions, and adapt strategies to ensure alignment with overall objectives. Measurable goals provide a basis for data-driven analysis, enabling organizations to refine their social media tactics for optimal performance and results.
Achievable:
The “achievable” component of SMART social media goals emphasizes the importance of setting objectives that are realistic and attainable within the available resources, time constraints, and capabilities. An achievable goal acknowledges the practical limitations of the organization, ensuring that the pursuit of the objective does not lead to unrealistic expectations or strained efforts. I
t prompts individuals and businesses to assess whether they possess the necessary tools, expertise, and support to successfully meet the outlined goal. This criteria encourages thoughtful planning and careful consideration of the organization’s current standing, fostering a strategic and sustainable approach to social media goal-setting.
Relevant:
A relevant goal ensures that the pursued outcome directly contributes to the overall success and growth of the company. It prompts individuals and teams to evaluate whether the social media goal is meaningful in the context of their specific industry, target audience, and business strategy. By emphasizing relevance, organizations can avoid allocating resources to objectives that might not significantly impact their core objectives.
This criterion encourages a strategic mindset, urging stakeholders to assess the purpose and significance of each social media goal in relation to the company’s mission, values, and long-term vision. Ultimately, a relevant goal ensures that social media efforts contribute purposefully to the organizational success and the fulfillment of broader business objectives.
Time Bound:
The “time-bound” aspect of SMART social media goals underscores the importance of setting specific timeframes for goal completion, introducing a sense of urgency and a structured timeline. This criterion helps organizations avoid open-ended objectives, promoting accountability and efficient resource allocation. By defining a clear endpoint or deadline for achieving a social media goal, businesses can create a sense of focus and prioritize tasks within the designated timeframe.
This time-bound criterion encourages strategic planning and prevents goals from becoming stagnant or losing relevance over extended periods. It instills a disciplined approach to social media strategy, prompting consistent evaluation and adjustment based on real-time data and evolving industry trends. Ultimately, incorporating a time-bound element ensures that social media goals are not only well-defined but also proactively pursued within a realistic timeframe.
By applying the SMART criteria, social media goals become more actionable and strategic. For example, a SMART goal might be: “Increase Facebook page likes by 10% in the next two months through a targeted content and advertising strategy.” This goal is specific (Facebook page likes), measurable (10% increase), achievable (reasonable growth), relevant (aligned with brand visibility), and time-bound (in the next two months).