Social media has triggered a radical shift in how customers engage with brands. Being able to take advantage of these changes requires an understanding of which social media metrics are relevant to your line of business. Social media is an effective tool that can support your company objectives, but just like with any other marketing tool, it’s important to focus your efforts.
Regardless of who you are or why you’re on social media, one thing is certain- for you to have an effective social media strategy, it is important to know what you’re trying to achieve. That means knowing what your social media goals are and how you’re going to reach them. Yet, it is amazing to see how many businesses have given scant thought to creating their social media goals.
Here is a list of some effective social media goals to help you maximize your ROI from social media.
Develop Brand Awareness
Creating brand awareness shortens the sales process, increases market share, and positions a brand as a leader within the industry type. Brand differentiation can develop from a number of actions such as the creation of original content, personalized promotions aimed at the target audience, prospect profiling, product development based on social insights, and communication strategies adapted for socio-demographics of interest.
Use The S.M.A.R.T Goal Framework:
Specific: Is your goal well defined? If you need more understanding about this, try asking yourself the “who, what, when, where, and how” of achieving the goal. For example: where do I want to boost social media engagement? (On Facebook? On Twitter? On LinkedIn?), when do I want to produce engaging posts?
Measurable: You want a goal that has one or more metrics, and also, more importantly, this is where analytics come in. For example: by how much should I boost my social media engagement?
Attainable: Is your goal really attainable? Or is it too far-fetched? Or is it not possible to achieve your goals. It is essential to set realistic goals before you put in the required work. For example: boosting engagement by 10% may be a stretch, how about boosting by 5%?
Relevant: With your current resources of time and money, is it possible to achieve your goals? Will it actually help your business grow? Does it resonate with who you are as a brand? For example: if your goals involve increasing followers on Twitter, make sure you understand how that will benefit your business.
Timely: Deadlines keep everyone accountable. Include a time frame for the completion of your goal, so you know when to check in on your success. For example, we need to reach 1K followers across all the social media platforms within the next 3 months.
Conducting social media audits
One of the most important tasks you need to take care of, even before setting your social media goals, is to establish your social media audits. With this, you will not only establish baseline targets but also ensure that goal you set is laser-targeted. Also, you will get a sense of your current level of performance.
Set your social media Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)
Unlike SMART goals, OKR goals are not meant to be 100% achievable. The objectives are meant to be very ambitious, and reaching 60-70% success is considered a win. The reason why you need OKR is that, in order to achieve the big chunk and make sure things are well, it’s necessary to get the smaller details right. So in a way, you will be chopping down your macro goals. The picture below illustrates how to effectively set OKRs.
Measure the right metrics
This is key to accomplishing your social media goals because you’ll know what is causing your progress and what factors are hindering it. It is often said that social media is all about vanity metrics that don’t matter. In short, your social media metrics can easily help you understand how your efforts are faring against your competition.
Follower growth
Engagement rate: starting from saves, then comments, shares, and then finally likes.
Reach: This is one of the most important metrics, it showcases whether you are becoming friends with the algorithm or not.
Ranking on explore: After a while of consistent posting your posts will start showing in people’s explore feed. Double down on the posts that do.
Using a social media planner to keep track of your metrics is an excellent strategy.
Social Media Trends
This is one of the more overlooked aspects of managing a social media account. Your content plan has to be in touch with what’s going on in the world. A good social media manager should know which way the market is leaning. They should know the current trends whether it’s culture, business, or geopolitical trends. They should use that information and make sure to reflect it in the content that they post to connect with their audience better.
Captions
Writing enticing captions on your social media posts is everything. Especially on Instagram & Twitter. Your captions should be a combination of precise, short lines that hit the mark and long, heartfelt & informative captions that help the audience engage.
A Hashtag strategy
An effective hashtag strategy requires you to select super-specific and apt hashtags and group ‘em together. Whether that is Instagram or Twitter, that is what works. Not more than 10 Hashtags at a time and only 5 on most posts.
Once you have a clear set of goals, you can track your key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics more accurately. Make sure to revisit your goals on a regular basis to determine if you are still on track or if something needs adjusting. A winning formula is to measure, adjust, and then rinse and repeat.
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