Originally published on Vulpine Interactive
Most people are terrible at setting goals, especially when it comes to social media.
Are you one of them?
Social media has changed the way humans interact with the world.
There’s no avoiding it.
Most people spend an average of 50 minutes per day hanging out on social media platforms, and many people admit that social media is the first thing they check in the morning and the last thing they see at night.
The number of people using social media worldwide is a whopping 2.8 billion, so it’s pretty much safe to say that social media is the number one way we stay connected to the things we care about.
And for at least 58% of the social media population, brands are included on the list of things we love to interact with on social.
If you’ve ever wondered whether social media is an important channel to consider as part of your marketing strategy, stop wondering.
The answer is:
Yes, social media is important.
Yes, social media can benefit your business.
Yes, you need a strategy.
YES, YES, YES!
However, as many business owners and CMOs know, social media can be a beast to tackle, especially if you can’t find the right agency, have the wrong expectations or set the wrong goals.
How to Think About Social Media Goals
Unfortunately, social media is not a clear-cut, 100% return input-output machine. If you put in X amount of dollars (or time), you aren’t always going to get more than X amount of dollars back.
It’s much more complicated than that.
Bear with me as I try to explain…
With social media marketing, the X you put in (time or money) usually generates some sort of Y(impressions, for example).
If you align your goals, expectations, and strategy (and execution on that strategy) you have a chance that the Y converts into more X.
The other variables that affect your success can be pretty tough to define. They are things like:
- The strength and investment you’ve made into your brand
- If your industry is good for social media
- The virality of your product
- Your relationship with your audience
- Your budget
- If you hire the right people to do the job
That being said, earn yourself enough Y and — assuming you’ve aligned the variables appropriately — eventually you will be able to see a lift in X.
By setting goals before you begin, it’s easier to measure success or failure (even if you can’t measure everything).
By setting goals for your #SocialMedia marketing efforts, it’s easier to measure success or failure.
It’s also worth noting that realistic social media goals aren’t always built around immediate ROI, and frankly, they shouldn’t be.
Most social media marketing is about a mix of revenue now and engagement or providing value to your audience (Y things), rather than direct response — which is more about the immediate tracked sales of your products and services (X things).
So, prepare accordingly.
How should you set your social media goals, metrics, and KPIs?
When it comes to social media marketing, I recommend you break your goals into main goals and channel-specific goals.
Determining Your Goals
In order to determine what your goals should be, you need to take a look at your business.
Not all companies will have the same set of goals and objectives.
The idea is to figure out which areas of your marketing strategy can be improved by implementing a social media strategy.
And I’ll admit, this can be easier said than done.
The 6 Main Goals For Social Media
- Driving Traffic
- Brand Awareness
- Authority
- Account Growth
- Engagement
- Leads / Sales
Strategies for Setting Metrics and KPIs to Track Success
Once you have your goals figured out, you can decide on which metrics and KPIs are the most valuable to track..
What’s the difference between KPIs and metrics and how do they relate to each other?
Basically, metrics are the measurement of tactical efforts and KPIs measure strategic efforts.
The best way to define your metrics and KPIs is to look at your main goal and work your way backward and list the items that you know will lead to the goal being met.
Now that you know how to choose your goals and define your metrics and KPIs, let’s jump into the main social media marketing goals, when / how you might incorporate them into your marketing plan, and how to track them.
Main Social Media Marketing Goals for Business:
Most companies will usually have a combination of these goals and from these goals is how you might choose your tactics that make up the strategy.
1. Driving Traffic
Driving traffic to a website can be really important for a business for a number of reasons.
The people who have visited your website are considered part of your warm audience, and warm audiences convert better than cold audiences in most cases.
On the whole, using social media to drive traffic to your website is a great idea when you have a website that is proven to convert because you can assume that more traffic will lead to more conversions.
When you set a goal for driving traffic to a website, the goal is mostly focused on a single metric: website sessions.
But, just sending people to a website doesn’t usually seal the deal.
If your site isn’t set up to convert traffic, it’s not cost-effective to focus on driving traffic.
If your site isn’t set up to convert traffic, it’s going to be very costly to drive traffic.
And if you aren’t getting any conversions from your traffic, then you need to focus on another goal.
2. Brand Awareness
Building “brand awareness” is another hot ticket item on the social media marketing goals list.
Everyone wants more brand awareness.
And using social media regularly will get you more, however, just being present is not enough for you to directly benefit from any “increased brand awareness.”
Also, the ROI on brand awareness increasing activities is very hard to track since this goal doesn’t directly tie back to revenue.
However, even though brand awareness may seem like an elusive, difficult to measure goal, it is still a crucial element for the success of any business (people need to know who you are in order to buy from you).
Increasing overall reach (as opposed to reach per post) and increasing impressions = increasing brand awareness: there are more and more eyeballs seeing your brand, thus having an impact on the end users’ awareness of your brand.
3. Authority
Building domain authority and thought leadership on social media is again, another hard to measure, but very common goal, especially for startup founders or companies in crowded spaces.
While this goal relies entirely on the ability of the brand to produce high-quality, mind-blowing, exciting content (or products), that content will never see the light of day if it is not being distributed properly.
Social media is a proven channel for content distribution, and not only does creating and promoting original content drive website visitors, it also has an effect on domain authority and thought leadership.
The difference in strategy for achieving status as an expert in the industry has more to do with the on-channel content being created and distributed in the feed.
It is not always ideal to drive people away from social media and back to your website if building authority is your number one goal because:
- Social platforms like Facebook don’t like it when you send traffic away from the platform,
- People will be more willing to communicate openly with you if they aren’t on your turf, and
- More people can publicly see your social media activities — commenting on a post in a group or on a thread — and decide that you know what you are talking about.
As with brand awareness, it’s the kind of thing that you may not be able to measure outright, but you know it when it’s there.
4. Account Growth
I’ve pretty much never worked with a client who didn’t want their social accounts to grow.
When you do good social media marketing, your accounts will grow. End of story.
But, how fast they grow really depends on so many different factors that it’s hard to predict and impossible to force.
That’s why many brands purchase followers, to make themselves appear more influential.
But, this often backfires as low engagement rates trigger algorithms to show your posts to less people, including your real audience.
Also, you will have trouble analyzing the demographics and other important information about your true audience because the fake or paid follows will corrupt your data.
As the fake profiles get deleted or the people who were paid to follow you unfollow your profile, your account will experience negative growth, and sometimes this effect is really hard to combat, even if you are gaining new, real followers organically.
Avoid the temptation. You will be better off.
5. Engagement
“Engagement” is a word that gets thrown around a lot when you deal with setting social media marketing goals.
While engagement metrics are easier to track than many other social media metrics (all of the major social networks have on-platform analytics readily available), they are mostly seen as vanity metrics because a post like doesn’t directly equal monetary gain.
However, having an engaged audience on social media is a coveted asset.
Engaged audiences are worth a lot these days because:
- They are difficult to build,
- They provide valuable insight into your potential and current customers,
- They help increase awareness for your brand, and
- They are easier to monetize.
If people aren’t engaging with your brand on social media, they aren’t pickin’ up what you’re throwin’ down, which means it’s time to go back to the drawing board and figure out where the drop-off is occurring.
6. Leads and Sales
Ah yes, leads and sales.
Now we’re at the good part, right?
While most social media goals are not necessarily tied back to revenue, if you’re not leveraging social media to acquire leads and generate sales in some fashion, you’re doing it wrong.
But, the truth is, most companies only want to focus on the leads and sales portion of social media goal setting.
The problem with this is that if you don’t work on the other non-sales-driven goals in conjunction with sales-focused activities, it is unlikely that your number of sales related to social media will grow.
People don’t go on Facebook to buy stuff.
They go there to see how their family and friends are doing, or to be entertained while they wait in line at the pharmacy, or to look at pictures of cute, extremely tiny farm animals…
You need to be thinking about how your company can steal attention away from a teacup piglet eating an ice cream cone under a tiny umbrella.
Photo Credit: Richard Austin, found on https://laughingsquid.com
And guess what?
No one is even going to see your posts if you haven’t taken the time to work on building an engaged audience.
No one is going to click on your ad if you haven’t focused on building brand awareness or studying what your audience deems as relevant.
So jumping the gun and saying “to hell with engagement, all I need are leads and sales” is a surefire way to fail at social media marketing.
But, if you’ve already invested the time and energy into the goals that ultimately affect how successful you will be at driving leads and sales, now’s the time to start thinking about how you might achieve your revenue goals with social media.
Why Just Showing Up is Not Enough
In the end, whatever your goals for social media are, there needs to be a sound strategy (tactics and plan of action) to drive the desired results.
Expecting to achieve an astronomical number of sales from social media just because you hired a freelancer to show up and post once a day is like expecting to win the lottery without even purchasing a ticket.
Posting blindly is not a viable strategy because it won’t help you hit your goals.
Posting blindly is not a viable strategy because it won’t help you hit your goals.
Want to know more about achieving your goals?
Thanks for reading The Marketing & Growth Hacking Publication
Follow us on Twitter. Join our Facebook Group. Subscribe to our YouTube Channel. Get our best stories in your inbox by following us below.
