Set Goals for your Social Media

If you are using social media as part of your visibility strategy then it is important to have digital goals and KPIs (not just physical ones). 

A goal is your outcome. Your strategy is how you will get there.

Plan out your social media by having setting goals. Plan out what you want to achieve and how you will achieve it.

Setting yourself some measurable goals will help ensure that you are getting as much value as possible from the time and resources that you invest in social media.

Here are some social media goals that you might like to set yourself:

1. Increase brand awareness

We all spend time (perhaps too much time) on social media and glued to our smartphones. In practice, this often means that we are scrolling through the world of social media feeds. If we are. Our clients and Customers are. Therefore, social media can be a great forum for increasing your brand awareness. Depending on your personal circumstances that may be your own personal and professional brand as an individual or alternatively it might be the brand of your company or business.

To make your goals measurable there are a number of potential metrics that you can use to measure your brand awareness:

• Followers count (how many people you can potentially reach)
• The actual Reach of your social media posts (how many people are your posts reaching on a regular basis across your social media platforms)
• Engagement. Such as likes, mentions, shares, and RTs etc (how many people are talking about you or sharing your social media posts?)

Most social media platforms provide native analytics, many third-party management tools make tracking and reporting these metric easier, therefore you may want to choose to track a metric that is based on the tools you are using.

2. Drive traffic to your website

Another key purpose for using social media is to drive people to your website or blog to help them find out more about you, your services or products and potentially become clients or customers.

Therefore it is important that you set and measure goals based on what you are wanting to achieve. To make your goals measurable there are a number of potential metrics that you can use to measure your traffic:

• traffic from social media (how many visitors are coming from your social media channels. This might be to your website, your blog, your shop, signing up to your mailing list etc).
• the share of the overall traffic (how much of your overall traffic does social media account for)
• the bounce rate of social media traffic (what quality of traffic are you getting from social media)
• how many clicks are you getting on your social media post

The easiest way to measure traffic to your website is to use Google Analytics. You can find traffic from your social media channels under: Acquisition > All Traffic > Channel. You can also click through to find the breakdown by social media platform.

3. Grow your revenue

By growing your revenue I am talking about increasing your sign-ups or sales. If you don’t have a long sales process this can be quite straightforward. This can mean that you can turn your audience directly into buyers by a click of the button. This is one of the reasons why goals 1 and 2 are important as they lead your buyer on their journey to making a purchase and if they need some extra encouragement goal 4 below as well.

To measure revenue growth you will want to be measuring sign ups and purchases that have resulted from social media channels and advertising on social media.

The easiest way to measure this is to use Google Analytics and set up goal tracking or use google analytics for ecommerce.

4. Generate new leads

If you do have a long sales process and/or you need to build a strong relationship with your potential customer before they will buy – you might want to use social media to generate new leads.

What this means for you personally and your business will depend on what it is you do (and the goal you choose should reflect this). These can easily be set up in google analytics. You might choose to measure things like:

• number of mailing list sign-ups (potential customers who have committed to finding out more and have signed up via social media)
• downloads of your content (number of people who have downloaded your free or freemium content)
• number of people who have engaged with your lead generation activities on social media (e.g. competitions, polls, giveaways etc)

5. Boost brand engagement

Social media makes your brand accessible. Therefore engagement and social interactions are important. Research has shown that social media interactions improve brand perception, loyalty, and word of mouth recommendations.

In addition to this, the social media platforms themselves will prioritise content with high engagement (likes and comments etc). Therefore good engaging content will boost your brand engagement.

Need help setting your social media campaign goals and planning your social media content? Why not grab a copy of our Social Media Planner.