Setting Social Media Goals Will Boost Your Business

Well well well, listen up folks! It’s time to talk about the importance of social media marketing goals for your brand. These goals aren’t one-size-fits-all – they’re unique to your specific goals for your business and customer journey. And let’s be real, whether you’re a social media newbie or a seasoned pro, setting goals for social media is crucial to your overall social media strategy. So, let’s get cracking and figure out how to get you to social media success!

But setting goals for social media can often feel like a daunting task. Getting lost in the constant goal-setting and goal-attempting cycle without tangible results is easy. Over the next few minutes, we will dive deep into setting social media goals:

• what they are
• why they matter and
• how you can set smart social media goals for your brand that are
  • specific
  • measurable
  • attainable
  • relevant
  • timely

Oh boy, get ready for some real talk. We’re going to dive into the world of smart social media marketing goals for those fancy-pants, established businesses. You know, the ones who already have it all together but still want to boost their website traffic, make their brand even more famous, and build a community of fans. All while showering their audience with love and attention. NBD. Let’s do this!

What Are Social Media Goals?

Social media goals are basically statements that explain what your business wants to achieve through your social media tactics or strategy. It’s like setting your sights on a target and working towards hitting it with your social media game.

• Social media management helps businesses that want to achieve with a social media tactic or social media strategy.
• They should be relevant to the business’s larger objectives and be time-sensitive.
• Setting social media goals should be grounded in measurable metrics and include specific performance indicators, such as follower increases or website traffic.

Did you know that social media goals can help you figure out what’s working and not in your marketing efforts? By setting goals for social media, you can identify your strengths and weaknesses and set new goals accordingly.

Otherwise, how do you know your time investment in good social media is worthwhile? Good business decisions depend on know the container you’re working in, and goals do just that.

Why do social media marketing goals matter?

Goals keep you accountable for the social media marketing goals you set. They may help remove your feelings from the issue, often a problem for founders and visionary small business leaders.

Achieving business objectives is a lot more motivating than “posting again today.” Realistic social media goals provide motivation and provide something to work towards, making it easier to manage budget, streamline workflow, and prove ROI. (That, of course, depends on social media goals and metrics that you can easily find–more on that later.)

Finally, goals help social media marketers build their brand and business over time by providing a way to listen to their target audience with social listening and sharing brand messaging that informs and educates.

5 Steps to Setting SMART Social Media Goals

If you’re new to setting goals, you may wonder why SMART goals are so often discussed in such glowing terms. There’s a reason! When setting social media goals, it’s vital to follow a few key steps to ensure that your goals are both specific and measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.

Specific social media goals

Good social media goals are specific. No vaguebooking here! To stay on track with social media goals, it is crucial to identify a specific goal that aligns with your business objectives.

For example, social media goals could include increasing your follower count on a platform such as Twitter or Facebook. When setting social media goals, it’s important to be specific and target a specific goal.

Another important tip is regularly reviewing your social media channels to ensure you meet your goals and stay productive. By taking these steps, you can ensure that you stay on track with your social media goals and effectively use social media for business purposes.

Measurable metrics

Oh snap, it’s time for a truth bomb. Sure, setting social media goals is a big part of any marketing strategy, but let’s not forget that those goals gotta be measurable too, my friends. Otherwise, how will you know if you’re actually making progress? Aiming to increase press mentions by 25% is both specific and measurable.

For all aspects of goalsetting, consider that some metrics are lead-generating and others are more of vanity metrics. Does that mean vanity has no place? Of course not! Increasing followers is good for the ego, but when done well it also proves your content is high quality and engaging–exactly what you want it to be.

Vanity metrics

In order to meet social media goals effectively, it is vital to track key performance indicators such as customer sentiment and customer engagement. Again, while average comments per post is typically considered a vanity metric, watching trends in those metrics is important. Other vanity metrics you may wish to track:

• follower count
• likes and comments
• shares

Lead-generating metrics

When it comes to social media goals and metrics, lead-generating metrics are more action-based than vanity metrics. Your call to action will often be what results in the actions you want to measure.

Things you may wish to measure:

• clickthroughs
• profile views
• saves

Sprout Social has a good article on metrics you may wish to track if you have different goals in mind.

Attainable

When setting those social media goals, it’s crucial to ensure they’re achievable. I mean, it’s great to shoot for the stars and all, but let’s not set ourselves up for failure, okay? This means we want to make sure they’re both realistic and within your control.

For example, setting goals of commenting on three competitor profiles per day or posting to your social media accounts at least once per day on some platforms could be challenging but still possible goals.

Aiming for short-term impact and long-term gain is a good way to ensure that your social media goals are attainable. A social media goal-setting template can help businesses set clear and realistic goals tailored to their business goals.

Relevant

To set SMART goals, it’s important to ensure that they the vision and values of the business. It’s like putting together the pieces of a puzzle – all those social media goals need to fit into the bigger picture of your business.

I could easily make a specific, measurable, and attainable goal to post a meme of Liz Lemon every week–but unless that’s lining up with realistic social media goals to build a community around the Know, Like, & Trust Factor it might not do a whole lot for my business! Similarly, I could set a social media engagement goal to comment on the influencersinthewild Instagram account each week, but that’s not likely to help me.

Setting social media goals should be linked to business goals, such as revenue generation or customer engagement. However, goals should be goal-specific, rather than blanket social media-based initiatives. This will keep you in the specific space, as well.

Time-bound

You must set a timeline for your goals and measure progress regularly to see how you are doing. All goals must have an end date, so you can measure your success and make adjustments in the future. Being able to compare two three-month periods against each other is key to making better decisions around marketing!

It’s important to be realistic about your goals and maintain a healthy level of skepticism when making progress. Set achievable goals and be prepared to change them if necessary.

Expecting to grow your email list by 25% is great–if you have a good reason to join the list. If you fall down that objective, the result in growth will show it.

3 Social Media Goals For Established, Sophisicated Online Businesses

Drive traffic to your website

Hold onto your hats, folks, because here’s a real shocker – social media marketing can help increase website traffic! (I know, right? It’s a real game-changer.) And get this – using social media marketing strategies can actually help you achieve this goal. Mind. Blown.

Some of the most popular goal setting strategies for driving website traffic include:

• creating engaging content that hint to more in blog posts
• social media posts that give must-know statistics
• promoting your business through organic search optimization of platforms like Pinterest. and TikTok
• linking to survey results that show the state of the industry

You can attract new customers and build a loyal customer base by posting engaging and interesting content on social media channels. Setting goals for social media to drive traffic have fairly easy metrics to measure.

Boost brand awareness & engagement with a mix of blogs and social media platforms

Many marketers prioritize increasing brand awareness as their goal on social networks.

If you want to really boost your brand on social media, here’s a little secret of social media aficionados – you gotta track those metrics! We’re talking about likes, shares, comments – all that good vanity stuff that tells you how much people are diggin’ your brand.

• Monitoring social media analytics allows marketers to identify posts that are generating the most engagement and making the biggest impact on social media. This information can be used to improve social media strategies going forward.
• Good social media goals should also target customer sentiment, such as increasing positive brand mentions by 30%. Tracking customer sentiment and increasing positive brand mentions over time can help brands build customer loyalty and a strong brand reputation.

Customer sentiment is one of the harder metrics to track, which is why so many of the social analytics tools out there push measuring likes and comments instead.

Good marketers build community while nurturing your audience

It’s time to talk about the power of social media for established businesses! If you really want to engage with your customers and build up that sweet brand awareness, then social media engagement goals is where it’s at. It’s like having your own little corner of the internet to connect with your audience and show off what makes your business so special.

To build a successful social media presence, it’s important to focus on engagement and building a presence rather than immediately selling products or services.

For community building, it’s also critical to encourage customers to interact and converse with your brand in order to build strong relationships. By gauging customer perceptions and delivering valuable content, social media can help establish your business as an expert in its field.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you create a social media goal?

Creating a social media goal can help you measure the success of your social media campaigns and strategies. A social media goal is a statement about what you want to achieve with a specific social marketing tactic or your whole social media strategy.

The goal should be measurable and achievable and should align with your brand’s overall marketing goals. Some common social media goals include generating leads, driving traffic to a website or online store, or getting more followers.

When setting up strategies around your goals, it’s important to consider the following:

• who you are trying to target
• which platforms are best suited for your goals (you may want to break down social media goals by platform)
• and how much budget you have allocated to running social media campaigns.

Furthermore, make sure that you regularly measure and track progress against these goals so you can adjust accordingly. With the right strategies in place, you will soon be able to reach your social media goals!

What is an example of a smart goal for social media?

One great example of a smart goal is to increase engagement with our current follower base. And if we really wanna make this happen, we gotta get specific. That means outlining exactly what metrics we’re gonna use to measure success (think analytics and key performance indicators), who’s in charge of making it happen, and what steps we need to take to make our goal a reality. So, let’s get our planning hats on and start setting some social media goals that are so smart they practically do the work for us!

Additionally, the goal should be realistic, relevant to the business’ objectives, and have a clear timeline for completion. With this goal, businesses can track their performance and make data-driven decisions on improving social media engagement.

How can you measure your efforts on social media?

Measuring good social media goals can seem like a daunting task, but with the right tools and strategies, it’s actually quite easy. To accurately measure your social media goals, start by tracking brand mentions, comments and tags, follower counts, engagement count, post impressions, and social shares per social media post and blog post. 

These metrics will give you an idea of how successful your marketing strategies are and how much ROI you are getting from them. You can set clear and realistic goals for each metric and track performance with an at-a-glance dashboard of achieved goals.

Finally, automating the process of social media analytics is a great way to avoid procrastination around this essential task. Many social media management tools and software solutions can help you automate the goal-setting, tracking, analysis, and reporting processes to make things easier.

As for where to measure? I’m a fan of Google Analytics, scary to navigate though it may be. Another popular option is Fathom.

Conclusion

Setting social media goals is a crucial part of your social media marketing strategy. However, goals by themselves aren’t enough. You also need to create strategies to achieve them. This blog has given you the media goals you can set that support goals for your business and helps you measure social media performance. We hope the information shared in this blog can help you make social media goals a reality in 2023! Now, share this blog on social media and tag a friend who needs to read it!