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Setting your Social Media Goals

Social Media Marketing is increasingly important for your business. It creates an avenue through which you can directly connect with your customers. Additionally, it forms a bridge between your business and your potential clients to make building a sales pipeline an easier and more effective task than some tactics of the past (e.g. cold calling).

Social media gives your company transparency and allows potential customers to more clearly understand the differences between you and your competitors. Social media is a way to create a voice for your company and a way to listen to your consumer’s concerns. The real-time data your business can collect through social media completely revolutionizes the connection between businesses and consumers.

Social Media Marketing Goals

Reasons why Social Media should be your secret weapon: Technology has transformed how entrepreneurs connect with their clients, customers and stay on top of the industry. Generally speaking, most businesses use social media to promote their business and boost their sales. Some even use it to make a difference and allow their business to grow. Now, entrepreneurs have to understand that this social media craze is not just a fad. As a matter of fact, it can be considered as a secret weapon if you know how to implement it correctly. Here are a few reasons why you should get on board.Before you begin to post information to social media channels, your business needs to define its specific goals that it is looking to achieve by leveraging social media. To effectively manage a social media campaign for your business, you must first be able to define how you are going to measure results. A goal of “increasing website visitors who view more than 3 pages” is an excellent goal.

Your social media campaign and its goals should align with your business’s overall marketing plan (which should tie in with the goals of your business). Once these goals are established, they will be used in every part of your social media strategy. Stay at a high level with your goals right now, you can make them more specific in the next section.

See a number of example goals below. These will get you started so you can write strong SMART goals.

  • Research and learning
  • Lead generation
  • Increase E-commerce sales
  • Increase store traffic
  • Increase brand or issue awareness
  • Reputation management
  • Get your Likes to talk about you (word of mouth)
  • Reach a youth audience
  • Promote an event
  • Build excitement prior to an event
  • Get people to take a particular action
  • Draw traffic to a particular online resource
  • Build your email list
  • Solicit donations for your organization
  • Get supporters to solicit donations for you
  • Recruit volunteers
  • Brand your staff as experts on a cause or issue
  • Get your constituents to talk to each other
  • Build a community around an event or topic
  • Get feedback from your constituents
  • Keep your supporters updated on events
  • Increase relevant visitor traffic and page rankings
  • Let supporters publicly support your cause
  • Disseminate information about an issue or topic
  • Recruit new members, advocates or patrons
  • Support a particular group of members, alumni, etc.
  • Tell stories about the work you do
  • Get press coverage
  • Connect with other like-minded organizations
  • Change hearts and minds on a particular topic
  • Gather photos or videos from supporters
  • Understand what people are saying about you
  • Keep up to date with a particular issue
  • Coordinate people in an action or a project

How will you Measure Success?

Now that you have identified the top three goals for your social media campaign it is important to set benchmarks so that you know if your campaign was a success. If your goal is to attract more people to your website, the success will be measured by an increase of people to the site which can be done by using Google Analytics. However, if a majority of these new people are leaving the site without taking action (i.e. placing an order or calling for more information) then it is hard to say if the campaign was a success. This is why it is very important to set specific foals (i.e. increase the number of sales by 10% annually through our website).

Instructions: Here, we will break down the goals into more specific, measurable outcomes. Below, restate the top three goals you defined above so they are:

Specific

Measurable

Attainable

Realistic

Time-based

What are your social media goals?

Social Media Goal #1: _____________________________________________________________

Social Media Goal #2: _____________________________________________________________

Social Media Goal #3: _____________________________________________________________

Examples:

  • Realty Elite seeks to increase the number of leads from social media by 20% over the next 12 months through the use of valuable content, Facebook Ads, and client support. This will be measured monthly.
  • We want to increase our referral rate to 95% (a simple survey will measure this) by the end of this year so we will invite all former clients to our Facebook page.
  • We want to get picked up by 5 local media outlets by the end of this year so we are going to build a communications strategy and start executing in 30 days.

Setting your social media goals. Before you begin to post information to social media channels, your business needs to define its specific goals that it is looking to achieve by leveraging social media. To effectively manage a social media campaign for your business, you must first be able to define how you are going to measure results. A goal of “increasing website visitors who view more than 3 pages” is an excellent goal.

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How to Measure Social Media ROI

BIMS_11.10We all know what ROI stands for. Unfortunately, not everyone understands its meaning and importance.

If your company is spending money on social media marketing, you want to measure your ROI. This is important so you have an idea what exactly it is you’re getting out of the time, effort and resources you commit to your campaign. It helps you measure the efficiency of your social media marketing efforts.

To show you how you can track your social media ROI, here are the steps you should take to help you gauge the effectiveness of your social media marketing campaign.

Identify your goal

Different organizations will have different goals. Before you can track and measure your ROI, you first need to identify your goals. Is it to generate more product trials, get signups for your newsletter or increase traffic to your site?

Track your goal

Each of your goals can be measured using specific metrics such as traffic, engagement, reach, lead generation etc. It all depends on your goal.

There are certain tools that can be used to measure the effectiveness of your actions. You can track follows, likes and share in Buffer. Website actions such as signups, downloads and sales can be tracked in Google Analytics.

Quantify social media return

Add up all the expenses, including the cost of boosting a Facebook post, running a promoted ad and everything that go into generating content and maintaining social media presence.

Determining how much you have spent will help you determine whether you’re getting a positive or negative return on your social media marketing efforts. Now, calculate your ROI using this formula: (Earnings – Costs) x 100 / Costs

Adjust tactics

Monitor the impact of your social media efforts using the formula given above and then adjust your tactics as needed to improve your social media ROI.

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