How to Set Smarter Social Media Goals (Tips + Examples)
You may be great at creating compelling content for social media. But turning business jargon into clear social media marketing goals can be intimidating. Sure, your latest TikTok might be gaining views, but how does that affect your company’s bottom line?
By now, most companies know that social media marketing can be good for their brand. It’s just that often companies aren’t quite sure what that value is. That’s where social media goals come in.
With this guide, you will be able to set clear goals for social media marketing. We’ll help you figure out what your company needs and how social media can help you get there.
A social media goal is a statement of what you want to achieve with your marketing activities. Good social media goals usually align with broader business goals. For example, you can increase your leads, drive traffic to your website, or expand your social media audience size.
Social media marketing goals can apply to anything from a single ad purchase to a full-blown campaign.
Social media goals are not the same as your social media strategy . Instead, think of goals as necessary components of a larger strategy.
Clear social media goals give you a goal to aim for and can help you get support at all levels of your business.
Well-defined social media marketing goals will also help you:
- manage your budget
- structure and optimize the workflow,
- prove the return on investment in your marketing ,
- and align your social media activities with your organization’s broader business goals.
Pro Tip: If you want to become an expert at social media marketing goal setting, we can help you. Hootsuite’s Social Marketing Certification Course has a section on setting strategic goals!
Set social media goals that will get you where you need to be by making them SMART. They must be specific , measurable , achievable, relevant and time bound .
Specific
What exactly do you want to achieve? You can start with a general direction, but try to make it as precise as possible.
For example, you don’t just want to increase the size of your audience. You want to increase the number of followers on LinkedIn. Here it is specifically!
Measurable
How will you know that you have reached your goal? A measurable goal uses specific social indicators to measure success.
Now we need to add some numbers to the target above. Let’s say you want to double your number of followers on LinkedIn. Boom, the goal is now measurable!
Attainable
It can be tempting to set yourself high goals, but don’t set yourself up for failure. If you’ve just launched but want to reach a million dollar sales by next week, you may be dreaming too much.
Let’s check the target in our example. Is doubling your LinkedIn followers an achievable goal? In this case, you need to look at your account growth over the past few months. Make sure your historical performance supports your goal.
Corresponding
Does the goal fit into the larger plan? Remember that goals are just part of your overall social media marketing strategy. Each goal should contribute to the achievement of your business goals.
What does the goal of our example look like? If you are a B2B social media marketer, very good! In this case, it makes sense to focus on a business-focused platform like LinkedIn.
Time limited
If your goal doesn’t have a deadline, it’s easier to put it off. We want to make sure we meet these social media goals, so be sure to set a timeline for completion.
We started with a desire to increase the size of your audience. We now know that you want to double your LinkedIn followers within six months. Our example goal is now SMART!
The social media goals you set should always reflect your specific business needs. But many goals can apply to just about any social media campaign. Some campaigns may even serve to achieve several goals at the same time.
Here are some examples of common social media goals and metrics you can use to measure their success. It can help you frame your work in a concrete, actionable – dare we say SMART? – conditions.
Increase brand awareness
Increasing brand awareness means increasing the number of people who know your brand. This goal is best suited for launching a new product or entering a new market.
Of course, expanding the audience never hurts. But brand awareness is usually the first step towards great achievement.
You can measure brand awareness with specific metrics such as
- Post Reach : How many people have seen the post since it was posted.
- Audience Growth Rate: The rate at which you gain followers over time.
- Potential Reach: The number of people likely to see the post during the reporting period.
- Social Share of Voice: How many people mention your brand on social media compared to your competitors.
Need help tracking brand awareness? Specialized social media management tools such as Hootsuite Analytics or Insights can help .
Social media video platforms are great for building brand awareness. If this is one of your goals, try social media channels like YouTube, TikTok, Instagram Stories, and Reels. After all, watching videos is the fourth most popular reason people use the Internet .
Manage brand reputation
Social media marketing is one of the best tools you can use to build trust in your brand. Trust drives growth these days . This social media goal measures the public’s attitude towards your brand.
Reputation metrics are similar to brand awareness metrics. Of course, you will track brand mentions and related hashtags . But you also want to see what people are saying about you, even if they don’t tag you.
Beyond traditional social media, consider using social audio platforms. Clubhouse, Twitter Spaces and Spotify are great for this.
For example, 22.9% of Internet users aged 16 to 64 listen to online radio shows or radio stations weekly. This number is even higher (39.6%) if we are talking about music streaming services. By capturing the attention of users on these platforms, you build your brand reputation.
Increase your website traffic
The goals of social media marketing are not limited to activities that occur on social media. Your website is a key player in your social media strategy. This is important whether you’re trying to increase sales or move people down the social media marketing funnel .
Measuring website traffic in analytics is relatively easy. Here are some of the main metrics you should keep an eye on:
Measuring website traffic in analytics is relatively easy. However, here are some of the main metrics you should keep an eye on:
- traffic to your site. This is obvious, but remember to limit your reporting to the most relevant period. This can be daily, weekly or monthly. If you have a baseline to compare traffic to, that’s even better!
- Network referrals. Referral monitoring can help you determine which platform is performing best.
- Electronic subscriptions. Once your social traffic hits your site, do they subscribe to your content?
Improve community engagement
Engagement is any visible interaction with your brand on social media. For example, liking, commenting, and sharing your posts are all forms of interaction.
Engagement is sometimes considered a measure of vanity , but this is not always the case. These softer signals can help you track how well your content is meeting the needs of your audience. Improving engagement means improving the quantity or quality of interaction with your audience.
There are several ways to calculate social media engagement rates . Here are some examples:
- Reach Engagement Rate (ERR) . The percentage of people who choose to interact with your content after viewing it. You can calculate this by individual post, or you can average it over time.
- Post Engagement Rate (ER Post) . Similar to ERR but measures the rate at which your subscribers engage with your content.
- Daily Engagement (Daily ER) . How often your followers interact with your account on a daily basis .
Increase conversions or sales
A conversion is when a user takes an action on your social media posts or website. This could mean signing up for a newsletter, registering for a webinar, or making a purchase.
If your social media presence isn’t driving sales, try focusing on conversions.
Depending on your specific business goals, you can measure conversion in several ways:
- Conversion Rate : The number of visitors who, after clicking on a link in your post, take an action on a page divided by the total number of visitors to that page.
- Click Through Rate (CTR) : How often people click on a call to action link in your post.
- Social media conversion rate : Percentage of total social media conversions.
- Bounce Rate : The percentage of users who click on one of your links only to leave without taking any action. (Unfortunately, you don’t listen to Big Freedia that often.)
Social platforms or campaigns with built-in shopping tools are great for conversion purposes. These include Pinterest Product Pins, Facebook Stores, Instagram Stores, TikTok, and Shopify.
Lead Generation
Not every social media interaction will lead to a sale – and that’s okay. If you want to fill your funnel with leads, you can set a goal to get more leads from social media .
Lead generation campaigns provide any information that will help you connect with a social media user. This includes names, email addresses, professions, employers, or other information they share.
Leads are a special kind of conversion. Because of this, both goals are useful in similar situations. They are also measured in a similar way.
Generally speaking, Facebook is the best lead generation platform. This advantage is due to the huge size of the audience and complex analytical tools.
To learn more about generating quality leads, we’ve put together a guide to social media leads .
Provide customer service
Your social media presence isn’t just about bringing in new customers. It’s also a place to keep the customers you already have. Social media customer experience goals can take many forms, including:
- Create a new customer support social media channel
- Reducing waiting time
- Increasing customer satisfaction
Measuring the success of your social customer service will depend on your goal. Typically, you will use data from customer reviews and customer satisfaction surveys.
Internal measurements, such as the number of service requests handled by a single customer service representative, can also be useful.
Conversational social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook are a good place to focus on your customer service goals.
Gain insight into the market with social media
If your top priority is learning what you need to know, you can set a goal to improve your business’s social listening .
Social listening is a two-step process. First, track social media activity related to your brand. Then analyze this information to gain insight into your company or industry.
Key metrics to track when listening to social media include:
- Brand mention . How many people are talking about your brand?
- Relevant hashtags . Are people participating in conversations related to your brand or industry?
- Mention of a competitor . How often do people talk about your competitors (and what do they say)?
- Industry Trends . Is interest in your key products growing? Do you need to change to meet new demands?
- Social Sentiments . What is the general tone of the conversation on social media?
Clear social listening goals can help you engage with your audience more effectively. They also help show the value of social marketing the next time budgeting season hits.
Recruit candidates for open positions
Using social media to fill open positions in your company is another type of conversion. In this case, you’re targeting a specific type of user interaction: submitting a resume.
When recruiting for an open job, quality conversions are much more important than quantity. LinkedIn is usually (but not always!) the best place to find an engaged audience.
When tracking social recruitment, keep an eye on metrics such as these:
- The number of leads per platform . Does Instagram Send More Candidates Than LinkedIn?
- Hiring source . After making a hiring decision, check where the candidate came from. Perhaps this flood of leads from Instagram was mostly spam.
Regardless of your broader social media marketing goals, social media SMART goals can help you succeed. At worst, you will learn from your mistakes!
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