The Ultimate Guide to Setting and Achieving Your Social Media Goals
Setting your business social media goals and achieving them requires detailed planning. Just like anything else in life, failure to plan is planning to fail. Your social media approach must be clearly defined so that you understand what you are working towards and how you would achieve it.
If this is something you are finding challenging, you may console yourself with the fact that you are not alone. Most businesses are yet to figure how they can align their social media campaigns with their goals for a successful venture. We seek to guide you on how to go about this and hopefully, you shall be successful.
Do social media goals really matter?
Any given business cannot afford to ignore setting goals for its social media approach. Goals help you to be accountable since you become aware of what you are working towards achieving and the client gets to see the expected results.
When you are not carefully, you may easily waste a lot of valuable business time on pointless social media activities. That is why goals come in handy to maintain objectivity.
Additionally, goals are essential to guiding your budget. Most businesses often struggle with setting aside the required budget for their social media campaign. However, if you have clearly articulated goals, you will know how much to spend on this. It informs you when to pay content creators and when you need to purchase ads.
Setting effective social media goals
As you appreciate the importance of setting social media goals, you may wonder how you can go about it and be successful.
Let these strategies inform every action that you take:
1. Start with a broad objective
Before you can worry about delving into minute details, start with the broader picture. Ask yourself this question – why am I even on social media to begin with?
The question is not meant to put you on the spot. Its purpose is mainly to shed more light to what you think social media should do for your business.
When you have the answer to the broad objective, you can look into the specifics and further drill down to the day-to-day encounters.
2. Set SMART goals
The specifics that you are focused on actually have to do with SMART goals. That is, Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-sensitive goals.
SMART goals look into the nitty-gritties of the set goals. That is, everything that you say you want to achieve must be backed by data so that you can be sure you are on the right path towards potentially realizing them.
3. Set your goal metrics
Don’t just say that “these are my goals.” Instead, have a clear definition of how you will measure their success or failure.
Each goal that you set must be associated with a KPI and metric.
For instance, if your goal is to increase brand awareness on Facebook, some of the metrics that you would closely look at include:
– Post reach
– Fan count
– Website analytics
– Post impressions
Measuring goals is an unavoidable undertaking in any social media effort. Failure to do this would leave you in the dark and second-guessing whether or not your efforts are bearing any fruits.
Following these three simple steps can have a tremendous impact on what your social media strategy looks like. Remember, start from a broad perspective then drill down to the specifics and have mechanisms for measuring the success or failure of your efforts.
