Social media goals outline what you want to accomplish with your social media marketing strategy. Without clear objectives, you can’t know if your social media efforts are working. On the other hand, well-defined goals can help you streamline the workflow, demonstrate the ROI, and align your social media strategy with your company’s broader business plans.
Not sure where to start?
With this pocket guide to setting social media goals, you’ll be able to develop an actionable plan and set your business up for growth.
How to Set SMART Social Media Goals
SMART goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. They give you motivation and a sense of direction, clarify your ideas, and keep your efforts focused. Here’s how to set SMART goals for social media:
- Specific — Determine what do you want to achieve with your social media strategy. You can first establish general objectives, but the definitive goals should be as specific as possible and answer the “what” and the “where.”
- Measurable — The goals you set should be measurable so you know if and when you achieve them. Determine which social media metrics you’re going to use to measure your success. Common ones include engagement, post reach, impressions, and follower count.
- Achievable — The goals you set should make you feel challenged but still be realistic and achievable. Think about whether you have the capabilities and resources to achieve the goals.
- Relevant — The social media objectives you set should align with the organization’s goals. Think of each goal as a piece of the big company puzzle. It’s wise to audit your existing social media activity to understand better what steps you need to take.
- Time-bound — You should be able to establish a timeline for your goals. If you can’t set up a start and finish date, the goal probably isn’t precise or feasible enough.
Top 5 Examples of Social Media Goals
The goals you set need to reflect your organization’s specific needs. However, the following examples can be used for virtually every social media strategy.
Grow Your Audience
Growing the audience is paramount for any business. A solid strategy for growing your community will involve identifying top-performing content, a consistent publishing strategy, and running campaigns that attract new followers. You might also want to consider signing up for Instagram growth services, for example. However, you should be careful when choosing. Kicksta, for example, has an unpredictable growth rate, so make sure to look for an agency that guarantees safe organic growth. Once you establish a strategy, keep an eye on mentions, number of followers, engagement rate, and share of voice.
Build Brand Awareness
Brand awareness is making consumers familiar with the qualities of the brand. The number of followers, traffic, impressions, the share of voice, and reach are the most important KPIs here. Brand awareness is crucial in situations such as entering a new market or launching a new product. Video social media formats such as Instagram Reels and Stories, TikTok, and YouTube are excellent choices for building brand awareness.
Improve Engagement
Engagement indicates how customers interact with your business on social media. It gives you an idea about whether your content strategy and message click with your customers. Moreover, it enables you to define your brand voice and make meaningful connections with followers. Engagement goals are beneficial when the company is launching a new product or wants to maintain an existing offer. The most important KPIs include clicks, comments, likes, shares, and mentions.
Boost Conversions
Social media ads can help you boost conversions, bringing about a healthy bottom line. To run successful ads, you need to define how you funnel social media traffic to relevant landing pages, which CTAs you’re using on social media, and who you’re targeting. Then, depending on your specific goals, you can measure conversion by CTR, bounce rate, conversion rate, CPC, and CPM.
Improve Customer Service
In addition to attracting new customers, you can use social media to nurture those you already have. One way to do so is to offer robust customer service. For example, you can use social media platforms to establish a new support channel, decrease wait times, and improve customer satisfaction. To measure the success of your customer service on social media, you can use data from testimonials or customer satisfaction surveys.
Final Words
To be successful on social media, you should set specific goals. This practice will help you visualize your campaign and know the exact steps you need to take to make them happen. Hopefully, this pocket guide will set you on track for success. Don’t forget to monitor data over time so you can learn if you’re reaching your goals and your action plan is working.
