With a new year always comes new goals we would want to achieve. Social Media is a key part in anyone’s business in today’s world, so it is important to know how to effectively achieve your Social Media Goals you set.
When it comes to setting Social Media goals you need to see where you stand and visualize where you would like to be. Your social media goals should align with and contribute to your business goals.
Step 1: Setting your objectives
What do you want to achieve, is it drive sales? generate more leads? build brand awareness? So your social media content complements your business efforts. When you figure out what exactly are your goals it’s easier to build a social media strategy around these goals and what metric you will use to track for success.
And lastly ask yourself which social media platform you should focus on, which one is highly beneficial for your business, don’t try to master many social media platforms at once.
Step 2: Analyze where you stand
You know where you want to be (your vision) but before even reaching your vision we need to take few steps backward till we get where you want to be. So now you need to perform a social media audit.
So for each platform, you will look at engagement rate, what types of content performed well, follower growth, demographics about your audience, types of posts that got people to take action (such as sales, sign-ups, comments or DMs) for every platform you will look at different things.
After analyzing this key information, keep it documented whether it is a spreadsheet. With this information, you are able to set realistic goals moving forward that will help you reach your business objectives.
Step 3: Pick out the metrics you will be using
Let’s pick up the key metrics that will be used to track your goals. The chosen Key performance indicators (KPIs) which are the key metrics, will help you analyze the success of your goals.
Each social media has its own KPIs that you can choose from. For instance, you want “increased brand awareness on your Instagram account” so the KPIs to look out for would be:
- Follower growth
- Impressions
- Brand mentions
- Traffic
Step 4: Setting SMART Goals
Your SMART goals should be: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-Sensitive.
Specific: Make your goals as specific as possible, simple and clear.
Measurable: How will you measure your goals? KIPs would be the ones used to help you measure.
Achievable: Is it reachable? You should reasonably accomplish your goals.
Relevant: Is this goal even relevant? They should align with your business objectives.
Time-sensitive: The timeline for your goal, give yourself a deadline.
If your plan is to increase monthly viewers on your Pinterest account, this is how you would apply the SMART framework.
- Specific: Reach 500K monthly viewers on Pinterest by end of the month.
- Measurable: The KPIs that you would consider would be the number of monthly viewers already displayed on your profile.
- Achievable: So is it possible for you to achieve this? Look at where you stand now if you perhaps have 150K monthly viewers is it a far stretch or possible to get to 500K monthly viewers?
- Relevant: How is this goal relevant to your business objectives? If your business objective is to look like an authority in your industry then reaching 500K monthly viewers is relevant, as people are more willing to trust your brand.
- Time-sensitive: The deadline for this would be until the end of the month.
Step 5: Track results over time and Report on performance
Now that you have set your social media goals, it is time to track and measure your results and progress. So for this look at analytics provided by the social media tool or a third-party tool.
So depending on your goal if it is increased brand awareness you would look at things such as audience growth, impressions and so on.
And finally, report on your performance, it is important to see if you reached your goal. In your report, you can include things such as a comparison of how your account looked like a month ago, key metric numbers.
This social media report will show you what you did right, what you did wrong, opportunities gained and if you reached your goal.
Setting goals and ensuring you reach them can be overwhelming, and even if you don’t meet your goals by the deadline, take your report and see where you did wrong and correct it. Don’t be too hard on yourself.
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