Creating Measurable Social Media Goals
Social media is a necessary part of advertising online. It creates awareness of your brand, facilitates customer interaction, promotes your content, and does a host of other things.
Even though it is so important, a lot of businesses still struggle with how to do it successfully.
Here are some tips and strategies to help you refocus your campaigns, create stronger goals, and implement a tracking schedule, so your social media efforts will be successful.
Social Media Goals
Developing a group of goals should be the first step in any social media program. Your goals could be anything from attracting new followers and audience interactions, to an increase in white paper downloads and qualified leads. But, in order for your program to be successful, your goals should be attainable, measurable, and most importantly, a reflection of your overall business goals.
Attainable – Your goals should be something that your company can actually achieve. For example, increasing Facebook likes by 10 percent over the previous year. Set a benchmark that you can reasonably get to by the end of the year, and you can always reevaluate if your company outperforms it.
Measurable – Establish concrete criteria for measuring your progress. Having a specific value assigned to a goal helps you measure your progress and stay on track.
One of the great things about social media is that there is a wealth of data available to you in real time. Whether you are using the analytics available on the social platform itself, or through a 3rd party system like Followerwonk or Hootsuite, it is easy to find out exactly how well your social programs are performing at all times.
Reflection of Your Business Goals – Create goals that will actually help your business succeed. You should think about what your business is trying to do and how social media can help you get there. Whether your company is trying to generate sales, leads, or whatever, your social goals should be like steps towards achieving those overall goals.
For example, if you work for a small manufacturing company, there are great social media opportunities on LinkedIn. To take advantage of these opportunities, you could identify relevant industry groups, publish useful content in those groups, and connect with people who could turn into actual clients.
Tracking Social Media Performance
Social media requires regular publishing and activity to really be successful. So once you have a set of goals, break them down into smaller, more manageable sections. Give yourself a target to hit each week so that you stay on pace to reach your goals by the end of the year.
Hold yourself accountable by keeping a weekly tally of what you did, what you got out of it, and what came from it.
What You Did –
Keeping track of what you did is simple; chart all of your social media activity for the week.
Keep a tally of:
- How many times did you post and on which platforms?
- What time of the day did your posts go out?
- What kinds of content did you post? – Was the content promotional, informational, funny, newsworthy, etc.? Were you posts boosted, sponsored, or free?
- How much money did you spend promoting posts?
What You Got Out Of It –
Keep another list for tracking your key performance indicators.
- How many likes?
- How many shares?
- How many retweets and favorites?
- How many comments?
- Referral traffic? – How many people came to your website directly from social media updates?
- How many people did your posts reach?
What Came From It –
Keep another list of the results of your campaign. This would be like the progress towards your yearly goals.
- How many new followers, subscribers, and LinkedIn connections?
- How many leads?
- How many sales?
- How many white paper downloads?
The landscape of the Internet is ever changing and Nicole has the energy and aptitude to keep Stevens & Tate Marketing out in front of the pack. She leads an enthusiastic team in strategic planning, development, search engine marketing, online promotions and advertising for the web.
