Social media marketing has immense potential to increase brand awareness and sales for businesses. Businesses are often not sure of that value. This is where social media goals come into play.
It can be daunting to create compelling social media content if you are a specialist in this area. All is not lost.
This guide will help you set social media goals for your company.
Bonus: Receive a social media analytics report template that shows you the most important metrics for each network.
A social media goal describes what you are trying to accomplish with your marketing activities. You can use the goal to describe a single ad purchase or a campaign.
Although both are essential, a social media goal and a strategy are not the same thing. Social media goals can be thought of as the foundation for your social media strategy.
There are many benefits to learning how social media goals can be set. Setting goals that are well-crafted will make you more successful.
Structure and streamline your workflow, manage your budget, demonstrate your marketing’s return-on-investment, align your social media activities with your company’s larger business goals.
Hootsuite’s Social Marketing Certification Course has a section on setting strategic goals. This course is a great option if you are looking to be an expert in setting goals for social media marketing.
Although setting a social media goal is not difficult, it helps to have a framework to help you.
You can set goals that will get you to where you want to go by making them SMART. They should be specific, measurable and attainable.
Specific.
What is your ultimate goal? Although it’s okay to begin with a general direction in mind, your ultimate goal should be precise.
Measurable
How do you know when your goal has been achieved? Your goal may not be precise enough if you don’t have any quantifiable indicators of success.
To measure your success, you’ll need to consider which social metrics can be used.
ttainable
Have you ever set a realistic goal for social media? You haven’t set realistic goals if your goal is to make a million dollars and your company was launched yesterday. Start your journey of 1,000 miles by taking a strong first step.
Relevant
Is the goal in line with your overall plan? Each goal should be part of a bigger picture.
You can use useful goals to solve a problem. You might consider doing a social media audit to assess your current activity. This will help you to understand your current social media activity and what you should do.
Time-bound
Is it possible to achieve your goal within a certain time frame? It could be an indication that your goal is not specific enough or achievable.
Your organization’s needs should be reflected in the social media goals that you set. However, many goals can be applied for any social media campaign.
These examples will help you frame and execute your work. You just need to make them SMART for you brand.
Increase brand awareness
To build brand awareness, you must increase the number of people who know about your brand.
This is especially important when you are launching a new product, or entering a new market. It’s never a bad idea to increase awareness of your brand. However, brand awareness is often the first step towards bigger things.
Specific metrics can be used to measure brand awareness, such as
Post reach is the number of people who have seen a particular post since it was published. Audience growth rate is how many people could see a post in a given reporting period. Social share of voice: How many people are talking about your brand on social media, compared to other brands.
Hootsuite Analytics and Insights are social monitoring tools that can provide advanced tools to track what people say about you, even if they don’t use your @handle or brand hashtags.
For brand awareness, video social media platforms can be a great choice. These platforms include YouTube, TikTok and Instagram Stories. These platforms let you take advantage of increased attention for video commands.
Brand reputation management
Your social media marketing efforts should be able to build trust in your brand. Your brand reputation management goals aim to influence the public’s perceptions of you.
Brand reputation metrics are very similar to brand awareness. Track brand mentions on social media and relevant hashtags.
You can also perform social media sentiment analysis using tools. These tools allow you to see what those mentions say about you.
Hootsuite Insights offers a deep dive into the reputation of your brand. Its tools are able to extract relevant information from over 1.3 trillion posts on social media in real-time.
Social audio platforms are a great way to influence your brand’s image. These platforms include Spotify, Twitter Spaces and Clubhouse. These platforms allow you to showcase your brand’s identity through deep engagement and user attention.
Increase your website’s traffic
Sometimes, you just want people to visit your website. Your website is an important part of your social media presence. It links a click to an advertisement to your rest of the online presence.
If you have a website presence and people are using it, increasing website traffic is a great goal.
It is easy to measure website traffic. It is possible to measure unique visits to your site over the longest period of time. This could be daily, weekly or monthly. To find the best platforms for your business, you can track where visitors come from.
Bonus: Receive a social media analytics report template that shows you the most important metrics for each network.
Get the template for free now!
Improve community engagement
Engagement is any type of interaction that your brand has on social media. All forms of engagement include likes, comments and shares.
You can improve engagement by focusing on the quality or quantity of your audience’s interactions with you via social media.
Engaged customers are a major asset to any brand. When your company is about to launch a new product, engagement goals can be useful. You can also use them to keep an existing offer going.
There are many ways to calculate your social media engagement. Some take into account all of your social media activity. Some focus on certain posts or types. These are the most important.
Hootsuite offers a free calculator for engagements to help you get the numbers you want quickly.
Increase conversions and sales
Conversion is the user taking some action on your website or social media posts. You can sign up for a newsletter or register for a webinar.
Imagine your brand has a strong presence on social media but it isn’t translating to a better bottom line. These situations are where conversion goals can be especially helpful.
You might be able to measure conversion depending on your goals.
Conversion rate: the number of visitors who, after clicking on a link in your post, take action on a page divided by that page’s total visitors.Click-Through Rate (CTR): how often people click on the call-to-action link in your post.Social Media Conversion Rate: the percentage of conversions from social media.Bounce rate: No, not how often you listen to Big Freedia. The bounce rate is the percentage of users who click on your links and then leave without taking any action.
For conversion goals, social platforms with integrated shopping tools work best. These include Pinterest Product Pins and Facebook Shops.
Generate leads
Every interaction won’t result in a sale. You might set a goal to increase your social media leads to keep in touch with potential customers.
Any information that allows you to follow up with social media users can count as a lead. This includes their names, email addresses and occupations.
Leads are one type of conversion. Both goals can be used in similar situations. They are also measured in the same way. Lead goals can be even more specific for certain situations. If your company wants to turn a strong social presence into sales, this is an example.
Facebook is the best platform to generate leads. Facebook’s large audience and advanced analytics tools give it an edge.
You should be aware that Facebook’s lead-generating benefits come from tools that raise serious privacy concerns. These technologies are still subject to a tug of war between surveillance technology and privacy technology. The quality of data they provide can vary.
We have compiled a guide to help you generate high-quality leads through social media.
Deliver customer service
Social media is more than just about getting new customers. It can also be a place where you keep customers you already have. There are many ways to improve customer service via social media.
Create a new channel for customer support on social mediaReduce wait timeIncrease customer satisfaction
How you formulate your goal will determine how successful your social customer services are. You will usually use customer feedback and testimonials to measure your success. You can also use internal measurements such as the number of customer service requests that are handled per representative.
For customer service goals, conversational social media platforms can be a great place to start. Twitter and Facebook are two of the most popular social media platforms.
Social listening gives you market insight
You might set a goal for improving your company’s social listening if your greatest need is to learn what you need.
Social listening is a two-step process. You first track the social media activity that is relevant to your brand. Next, you analyze this information to gain insights into your industry.
Social listening is characterized by the following metrics:
Brand mentionsRelevant hashtagsCompetitor namesIndustry trendsSocial sentiment
Social listening goals will help you connect with your audience better. These goals also show the value of social media marketing when budgeting season comes around.
Attract qualified candidates for open positions
Another type of conversion is using social media to fill open jobs in your company. This case is about a specific type of interaction: submitting resumes.
Attracting quality conversions is more important than quantity. Learn how to make your LinkedIn account work for you. This will allow you to attract the best candidates for your job.
These social media marketing goals will help you get on the right track to SMART social media goals. Even if you fail, a goal with SMART helps you learn from your mistakes. This will make you a winner. You either succeed or you get valuable information.
Hootsuite can help you achieve all your social media goals on all platforms. You can manage all your social media accounts from one place.
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