3 Social Media Goals You Can Set for Your Business (and How to Track Them)

08 Feb 3 Social Media Goals You Can Set for Your Business (and How to Track Them)

So your brand or business is on social media – but have you figured out why or what you want to get out of it? Setting goals is a great way to stay on track and give you direction when creating content and posting on your social channels. In this post I’ll show you 3 common and simple social media goals you can set for your business, and how you can keep track of your success with them.

Buffer recently released the results of their State of Social 2016 survey, and the chart above outlines the top the reasons business use social media. I’ve outlined the 3 simple social media goals you can set for your business based on why most brands get on social media in the first place.

1. Increase Brand Awareness

Increasing Brand awareness is the top reason businesses use social media according to Buffer’s State of Social 2016 survey. This makes sense because most businesses want to get on social media to reach new consumers, keep current consumers engaged and informed about their brand, as well as bring in more sales. But how do you keep track of this social media goal?

Here are some metrics to track to give you insight into your social media brand awareness:

• Followers – This is not the most important metric (I emphasize quality over quantity) but acquiring followers that are genuinely interested in your brand is one way to know that more people are learning about you. Pay attention to your follower numbers, and any large increases.
• Reach – Reach describes how many people see your posts. The more reach, the better. Once you identify which posts are reaching the most people, try to replicate these posts to continue getting good reach.
• Mentions, Shares or Retweets – The more people are talking and mentioning your brand, retweeting or sharing your posts, the more eyes you are potentially reaching through their networks. Again, pay attention to the posts your audience is sharing the most and create more content based on these subjects.

How to track it:

Most social media networks now have metrics built in. Get familiar with each social network and their respective analytics dashboards. You’ll be able to see how posts perform individually, as well as get an idea of how your account is doing as a whole. Third party tools can be really useful for gathering insights as well. Aside from both checking out built in metrics and using third party tools, I keep an excel where every month we take note of key statistics like follower numbers for each network my clients are on. Having a running document makes it easy to look back and spot patterns that correlate with the activities on the account.

2. Increasing Engagement

Increasing engagement is a very important goal for me as a social media marketer – and possibly the most important social media goal. What is the point of putting all this work into your social media presence if your audience wants nothing to do with you? Engagement is also a great metric for tracking whether or not your social media activity is attracting the right kind of followers.

How to track it:

• Traffic to Your Website: Traffic is driven to your site from social media is a good way to measure engagement. This means that when you post a link, people are interested and are actually going to check out the content, service, or product you’re promoting. Use Google analytics and pay attention to which networks are driving traffic, bounce rates (to see if people from social media are actually reading through your content).
• Likes, Comments, Shares: The simplest way to track engagement is to take a look at how many people are directly interacting with your posts.
• Clicks: Use a URL shortener like Bit.ly to keep track of link clicks. Some networks will have this metrics included in their analytics dashboard.

Having trouble with your social media engagement? Check out these posts:

• How to increase organic reach on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and more
• 7 Post Ideas that Drive Social Media Engagement
• 6 Tactics to Instantly Boost Social Media Reach

3. Generating New Leads

Social media can be great for generating leads and building email lists. Generating leads (or increasing social media leads) can be a good social media goal for businesses that sell products or services. The more leads and prospects the more chances you have to make money! Same for your email list – the bigger the list, the bigger the possibility of converting them into buyers.

How to track it:

• Downloads: Take a look at how many downloads your gated content has. Your new goal can be to increase downloads by a certain percentage or number.
• Information: How many email addresses have you been able to collect? Set a benchmark and then make it a goal to beat it!
• Participation: How many people took part in your latest contest? How many answered your last question? Make it a point to try to get your followers involved with your brand.

Setting goals may be one of the most overlooked parts of social media strategy. Having something to work towards will not only help you step up your social media game, but can help coming up with and creating content a little easer. After reading this post, what social media goals will you set for your brand or business?

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