Before we discuss about what we mean by social media goals and why we need these, we need to get clarity on social media objectives. Are you wondering how social media goals are different from social media objectives? If you do, I don’t blame you for the same. In fact, I was not clear about the difference too when I began my digital marketing career about 5 years back. So, let us unearth the subtle difference between the two terminologies.
An objective, which precedes setting up of goals, is nothing but the answer to ‘what’ social media will help your firm achieve eventually. It could range from ‘brand awareness’ to ‘customer experience’ to ‘business conversions’ to ‘online reputation management’ to what not.
Once you have decided on the objectives, you will move on to determine social media goals that would precisely indicate ‘how’ and ‘when’ you are going to achieve the set objective. In short, the specifics of attaining an objective are what we call goals.
To deepen our understanding of social media goals, we will dive into a widely used framework, i.e. SMART. Basically, this framework maintains that any goal should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely. Let us take a look at each of the five traits of a goal one after another:
1. Specific – Let us say that your objective is to increase brand awareness through social media channels. What do you reckon your goal should look like? It should definitely be precise and specific to start with.
Setting up a goal, such as increasing social media reach for the purpose of spreading brand awareness, is not a bad starting point. However, you need to question if the set goal is specific enough for you to work on. In the aforementioned example, do you know how many followers we are striving to get and when? And on which social channel?
A more precise and specific goal would seem like: ‘Gain 100,000 followers on Twitter’. While being specific, this goal does not yet meet the other parameters of the SMART framework and we will come to know why as we move on.
2. Measurable – When setting up a specific goal, you need to further question if it is something that can easily be tracked and measured. While a vague goal such as increasing social media reach is hard to measure, a specific goal similar to gaining 100,000 Twitter followers is something we can definitely measure and keep a track of using Twitter analytics.
3. Attainable – If you have been able to grow your followers by 500 per month on an average in the recent past, would a goal of gaining 100,000 followers be really attainable? I guess not. You may want to engage in social media audit so as to set baseline targets which, in turn, will lead you to set realistic and achievable social media goals for your brand.
4. Relevant – If your objective is brand awareness and you are working on achieving a goal of increasing click-through rate on your tweets to 5%, you are probably not on the right track because there is barely any connection between the objective and the goal. So, you need to stay relevant to your objective when deciding on your social media goals.
5. Timely – It is very important to link a deadline to your social media goal. Is it a week or a month or a quarter that you need in order to achieve the set goal?
Let us now write down a goal that meets all the 5 characteristics discussed above.
‘Gain 1000 Twitter followers by the end of the month.’ – This is a perfect example of a SMART goal if your objective is to increase brand awareness as it is specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely.
Here is a list of few more examples of social media objectives and their corresponding SMART goals for your perusal:
| Social Media Objectives (What) | SMART Social Media Goals (How and When) |
| Brand Awareness – Increase brand awareness of the new café in next three months within 5 mile radius. | Increase total number of likes on Facebook by 15% in next 3 months.
Boost our social share of voice by 10% on Twitter in 3-month period. |
| Customer Experience – Turn our clients into loyal brand advocates by means of improving customer service. | Reduce average response time on Facebook to 1 hour in a month. |
| Business Conversions – Provide our sales team with high quality leads through social media. | Increase the total number of whitepaper downloads on LinkedIn to 15 by the end of the month. |
| Online Reputation Management – Protect our organisation from threats on social media. | Increase detection speed of negative brand mentions on social media by 20% by the end of year. |
After you have decided on your social media objectives and goals, you should go about choosing the right set of metrics to measure success on. If you do not keep track of appropriate metrics, it will be almost an impossible task for you to determine whether you are achieving social media goals and objectives or not.
Likes, comments, shares and followers are often dismissed by businesses because these represent vanity metrics – something that has the least relevance in the context of overall business objectives. While vanity metrics should not be completely ignored as these help you compare your brand against its competitors on social media and determine what type of post is resonating with the audience the most, you should go about tracking metrics that clearly link to business results. A list of such metrics is given below:
1. Reach – how many people do the posts reach every day/week/month?
2. Audience Engagement – how many people are interacting with your social media posts by means of liking, sharing, commenting and brand mentions?
3. Site Traffic – How many visitors are coming to a landing page/website from social media channels? How much is the share of social media traffic in comparison to overall traffic to the website? Do visitors from social media drop off soon after checking out the landing page or do they interact with several pages instead?
4. Leads Generated – How many email addresses have you collected through social media? How many people (coming from any social media channel) downloaded the gated content on your website or landing page? How many people clicked on the posts aimed at lead generation on social media? Are the leads obtained from social media converting into sales?
5. Revenue generated – how much revenue is being generated through social media sign-ups or social media advertising?
When figuring out what metrics to measure the social media success on, you should question if the chosen metrics align well with the set objectives and goals. Would you be able to track these easily and do such metrics help in making decisions?
Always dig deeper into data to make decisions that drive growth and improve performance. For example, you may find out that a specific social media channel is only contributing 15% of the overall social media traffic to your website. However, when you compare the traffic data with that of conversions, it could turn out that the channel contributing the least amount of traffic is actually driving conversions (in the form of repeat purchases or new email sign-ups) at a better rate than that of any other social media channel your brand is currently present on. It is a clear indication that you should consider limiting your social media presence to only those channels that pass on traffic with the least bounce rate and a great deal of conversion rate.
With clear objectives, goals and metrics in place, you are well on your way to proving social return on investment to all the concerned stakeholders.
Contact us if you have any question about this article or if you would like some assistance with managing social media for your firm.
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