How to Set Social Media Goals and Reach Them

  • Date: 12 March 2018
  • reading time: 4 Minutes Minutes
  • Blogger: Gurby Bulo

Setting the right social media goal is very important for your business. With the right social media goals you will be able to see if your social media efforts are paying off in general. Having goals also helps in establishing your voice, content and choosing which channels to use. Through this, you will also be able to see the time, money, and effort put into social media. With the right social media goals, this could mean real impact on your business instead of wasting time.

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Setting Up the Right Soci al Media Goals

Determining Your Objective

After setting your objectives, set your social media goals on how and when to achieve these objectives. Goals are specific actions that aim to achieve your social media objectives. These objectives could be brand awareness, business conversions, customer experience and online reputation management and others.

Use the SMART Principle as your Goal Framework

Set goals that are specific, measureable, attainable, relevant an d timely (SMART).

Your goals should be specific. If you want to increase your social media reach, how many do you want to reach? Define in numbers and which channels you want to be followed.

Your goals should be measureable. Be sure that your goals can be measured. If they are not, they can not contribute to what you want to achieve. See your progress and if your efforts are useful or not. For customer service, see if inquiries have increased or not through Tweets

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Your goals should be attainable. Make use of information in setting goals that are within your reach. Being able to reach a social media platform, you are assured that it can be done.

Your goals should be relevant. Be sure that your goal is relevant to your businesses' success.

Your goal should be timely. Have your time to reach your goals. With deadlines, you will be able to keep everything up to date and you will be kept accountable.

An example of a SMART goal would be:

"We will grow our Facebook and Instagram following 50 new followers per week on each platform."

SMART goals are only truly smart if they have all five characteristics.

Conduct a Social Media Audit

Audit of existing social media goals and objectives, helps in setting baseline targets which also help in setting appropriate goals for improvement. After the audit, you have the option to revise your SMART goals based on previous performance.

Choose the Right Metrics in Measuring Success

Metrics show how you are achieving social media goals and objectives. Shares, likes, comments, and followers are examples of how metrics are measured. They may be referred to as 'vanity metrics' when they have no relation to your business objectives. But do not dismiss them entirely. They can be used to measure your interest in competition and in the type of content that your audience is interested in. Track metrics like: reach, audience engagement, site traffic, leads generated, sign-ups and conversions and revenue generated social media contributions to your business goals and objectives.

If you are not sure what to do:

After, look at the data and try and improve your social media ROI. Change your tactics if something is not going as you planned. Keep in mind that it is better to use fewer channels than having a social network.

To ease your social media work, use Hootsuite to achieve your goals across platforms. With the use of Hootsuite's dashboard you can schedule, publish and interact with your audience and monitor conversations about your brand. You can also measure your social media performance with real-time analytics.

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  • Blogger: Gurby Bulo
  • E-mail: [email protected]
  • Online Marketing Strategy Expert at Social Media Gids
  • Internet entrepreneur Gurby Bulo is the Founder of Social Media Gids and host of @SMG Hangout. With his virtual team, they follow the latest online marketing developments because they like it ;-) and to provide you with information, strategies and support necessary to increase your online marketing knowledge, sales and growth on your way to (financial) freedom.
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