Most small business owners and entrepreneurs know that social media marketing offers a ton of opportunities to help them build brand awareness and generate leads for their business.
If you’re not convinced (yet), check out these (42) Essential Social Media Statistics for 2020.
The biggest challenge for small businesses and entrepreneurs is finding the time to manage their social media marketing. Luckily, I have an article I wrote to help you manage your social media marketing in just 2 hours a month.
The key to success in your social media marketing efforts depends on setting clear goals on what you want to accomplish and then putting things in place to track and measure your goals so you can make adjustments along the way to optimize your efforts.
How to Set Social Media Goals in (3) Steps
STEP 1: Conduct a Social Media Audit
Before I begin coaching clients I always ask, “where are you at?”. After all, I can’t effectively coach someone if I don’t have a clear picture of where they stand at the moment.
The same is true for you.
Before you set goals, it’s best to get a clear picture of where you stand right now. That means that you should conduct a quick social media audit on your existing social media accounts.
STEP 2: Establish Your Social Media Marketing Objectives
Once you’ve completed your audit, you’ll want to decide on your objectives. Here are (5) key objectives that you could integrate into your social media marketing strategy they are:
Build Brand Awareness
When you post on social media you are creating awareness for your brand. Creating brand awareness helps shorten the sales process, builds brand trust and authority, and positions your brand as a leader in your sector.
The key KPI’s to help track this objective are:
- Mentions: the number of times your brand shows up in social media conversations and the number of times these conversations are shared.
- Impressions: the number of potential views that a message/post has.
- Reach: the number of people who have viewed your message/post.
- Social Sessions (Clicks): the number of site visits, blog post views, link clicks.
Increase Your Social Following
Building your social following is important because it provides you with another opportunity to get your brand’s message in front of your audience.
That being said, it’s important to understand that once you get someone to follow your brand you want to get them to opt into your email marketing list as soon as possible. This is important because you don’t own the social platform you are using – you own your email marketing list.
Key KPI’s to track this objective are:
- Community Performance: the number of fans, followers, or subscribers broken down by each social media channel.
- Comparison: your number of followers compared to your competitors.
- Community Growth: the increase in followers broken down by each social media channel.
- Social Visits: the number of visitors coming to your social media account(s) from your brand’s blog.
Increase Engagement to Build Brand Loyalty
The primary objective of increasing engagement is to build a long-lasting relationship with your perfect ideal customer, customer, and your brand. When you engage with your prospects and customers through social media, you are showing them that you care about them. Brands that take the time to engage with their audience will reap the rewards of brand loyalty.
The KPI’s to track this objective are:
- Interaction Performance: the number of likes, comments, shares, tweets, etc.
Monitor Customer Feedback
Another objective brands should focus on is learning from and listening to their fans and followers.
When you are choosing the posts to share with your audience, you should incorporate posts that encourage specific feedback that you can use to make your products/service better.
You should also set up listening tools that allow you to capture the opinion of your fans and followers.
The KPI’s to track this objective are:
- Interaction Performance: the number of comments and mentions.
- Response Performance: the number of responses your team produces to the interactions, comments, and mentions.
- Perception Performance: the number of positive vs negative responses.
Convert Followers into Leads
As your brand consistently shares content and engages with your fans and followers you should start to generate more social media followers. Again, it’s worthy to note that your ultimate goal is to capture those fans and followers on your email marketing list because you don’t own the social platform. Capturing those fans and followers will become much easier when you are consistently showing up in their newsfeed.
The KPI’s to track this objective are:
- Follower Performance: the number of social media followers.
- Lead Performance: the number of leads captured on your email marketing list.
STEP 3: Set S.M.A.R.T. Goals
The last step in reaching your social media goals is to take the time to set S.M.A.R.T. Goals. S.M.A.R.T. stands for:
- Specific: set specific and clear goals. “Increase my followers” isn’t a goal. “Increase my followers by 1,000” is. Make sure you have clear specific targets set.
- Measurable: make sure you have a way to measure your specific goals through metrics.
- Attainable: as with all goals, they should stretch you – but, at the same time they should be attainable.
- Relevant: make sure your goals are in alignment with your overall objective. If your goal is to increase your followers (for example) make sure you are clear on how that benefits your business.
- Time-bound: setting deadlines keeps things moving forward and everyone accountable. When you set your specific goals, you should also include a deadline on when they should be accomplished.
In Conclusion
As you read through this list, you might wonder HOW you can track and measure your social media marketing goals. It is possible to manually pull these numbers and create reports from each social media platform – but, it will be time-consuming!
I recommend that you use Hootsuite to help you achieve and track your goals. Check out this article on how you can manage your social media marketing in just 2-hours a month!
Hootsuite allows you to schedule, publish, interact with your audience, monitor conversations, and measure performance all from one easy-to-use dashboard.
