Follow these tips to determine your social media marketing goals. Photo credit: Swen-Peter Ekkebus
Setting the right goals can help improve social media marketing results and demonstrate its value.
Goals and objectives can come in many different shapes and forms, depending on your brand’s mission. The goals also often change as you increase your brand’s online influence.
Kevan Lee at Buffer suggests seven goal-setting strategies.
For instance, the SMART approach is a popular goal-setting strategy in business.
S – Specific. Consider the five “W” questions: who, what, where, why, and which to create specific goals. The more specific you can be, the easier it will be to understand what needs be accomplished.
M – Measurable. The goal should be measureable. Choose a specific number to achieve.
A – Attainable. Goals should be realistic and possible to attain.
R — Relevant. Well-chosen goals have the potential to impact your business objectives, vision, or values.
T — Time-bound. Give your goal a deadline.
Write down your goals, he advises. A study by Dominican University found that people who just thought about their goals achieved 43% of their goals. Those who wrote down their goals, created an action plan, and shared accountability with a colleague, completed 76% of their goals.
Two Main Social Media Goals
In an Unbounce blog post, Danielle Prager, a social media marketer at Rival IQ, cites two social media marketing goals: humanize your brand and fill the top of the sales funnel. The second goal is more challenging. She offers these recommendations.
Measure how many qualified leads social media is sending to the funnel. Look at “referral sources” in Google Analytics to see how much website traffic social media networks are sending to your site. For more precise data, create a custom funnel report to track how many referrals convert to sign-ups.
Specific goals differ depending on the network, Prager explains.
Twitter Metrics
Follower growth. For Twitter, track the change in the number of followers over time. To set realistic goals, check how competitors are performing. Track how often you tweet and compare it to your follower growth. Seek a correlation to determine the optimum tweeting frequency. Although many commentators suggest an ideal frequency, there’s no one-size-fits-all plan.
Replies and mentions. Mentions are preferable from a marketing standpoint. Replies begin with your Twitter handle. People can see others’ replies in their timeline only if they follow both the sender and the recipient. They can see all mentions posted by Twitter users they follow.
Retweets and favorites. While favorites are nice positive reinforcement, retweets are far more valuable since they increase your reach. Don’t be afraid to ask people to retweet. It increases the chance of retweeting by 160%
Monitor mentions. By carefully monitoring brand mentions, you can learn about your customer base, where you’re performing well and where you can improve. Reply appropriately to mentions, even it’s a simple “Thanks for sharing.”
Insights into Facebook
Select metrics to track in Facebook Insights.
Reach, the number of people who potentially saw your post, is particularly important if you’re experimenting with paid advertising.
Engagement. Facebook’s algorithm, EdgeRank, stresses engagement. Your followers must like, comment on, and share your posts in order for your posts to appear in their newsfeeds.
Measure clicks, likes, comments and shares of each of your posts. The number of shares is the most important metric, as it increases the content’s reach. According to Mashable, posts can increase engagement by including emoticons, asking a question, including a photo, and asking followers to like or share.
Bottom Line: Set realistic and measurable goals to improve social media marketing results and demonstrate the value of your marketing efforts. The best goals take into account how social media contributes to the sales funnel by measuring qualified leads.
William J. Comcowich founded and served as CEO of CyberAlert LLC, the predecessor of Glean.info. He is currently serving as Interim CEO and member of the Board of Directors. Glean.info provides customized media monitoring, media measurement and analytics solutions across all types of traditional and social media.
Thanks for your information and it is so good. It is very helpful and informative. I appreciate your blog post, beautifully expressed and well written.