Setting goals is a great way to track how successful your social media marketing is and if the strategies you are using are worth the time and effort you are putting into them.
Goals should use the SMART system.
Here are some things you may want focus your goals around:
- Brand awareness
- Community engagement
- Sales
With the average person spending 2 hours a day on social media, you can see why social networks have become a key platform in increasing brand awareness for businesses of all sizes.
If you wish to make goals around brand awareness, you can track things like:
- Following
- Reach
- Engagement (mentions/shares/retweets)
There are plenty of tools you can use to measure this, such as Buffer or TwitterBinder.
Just remember – when setting goals, the amount of follows and likes may not be a goal you want to work towards when it comes to your business. You could have 5000 Facebook likes, but this does not translate to sales and profit. A like/follow is a passive action.
While there is nothing wrong with wanting to build up a following or audience and having goals to achieve that, also be aware of the primary goal of your business – to sell your product or service.
You can focus your goals on driving traffic to your website or a landing page. You can use Google Analytics to check where your traffic is coming from. You can even set up specific URLs to track how well a particular piece of content is doing. You can use these URLs to track how many people are coming over from your Instagram profile, for example, and signing up for your newsletter.
The most obvious goal to set is how many sales social media marketing is gaining for you. You could set up a goal conversion in Google Analytics to help track this, or simply see how your sales are increasing.
Increasing community engagement is a great way to ensure loyalty and get people mentioning your brand. Tweetdeck is a great free tool that allows you to track mentions and hashtags to see what people are saying about you even if they don’t tag you. This allows you to then interact with these people – which could be great for rescuing a bad customer experience and turning it into a positive experience be solving their problems and letting the customer feel listened to and valued.
Newsletters are a great marketing tool. If your followers or customers are willing to give you their email address, then they are interested in your business. Many people use social media to encourage people to sign up to their newsletter – whether that’s simply asking someone to sign up in a Tweet or offering a free download of some kind when someone signs up. Once someone signs up to your newsletter, you can send them targeted newsletters to keep them up to date with your business and products.
These are just a few things you can think about when tracking how well your social media marketing is doing. Good luck!
