The average American spends three and a half hours on their phone daily. We all understand how social media’s mini doses of dopamine keep us glued to our screens for far longer than we want to.
But how do businesses capitalize on this? How do we turn novel and engaging social media posts into revenue? Setting social media goals is the starting point.
Throughout this blog post, we’ll discuss setting social media goals before demonstrating how you can achieve them. Plus, we include a handful of examples if you need inspiration.
Table of Contents
Social media goals are declarations of what a business wants to achieve with its social media activities. These targets allow every organization member to understand exactly what its marketing tactics aim to accomplish.
For example, increasing brand awareness is among the top priorities for social media marketers. While most people can grasp the concept of brand awareness, what does it actually mean in terms of goals?
Let’s use an example to explain.
The dropshipping industry reached a global value of over $243 billion in 2023 according to Statista. Dropshipping is an accessible industry with few barriers to entry and enormous revenue potential.
That said, competition makes it difficult to stand out. Why should a customer buy your product over your competitor’s when the items seem identical?
Brand awareness is often the key differentiator in customer decision-making. Since social media is the primary marketing tool for dropshippers, brand awareness is a critical goal across their social platforms.
This goal could be represented as a specific number of followers on Instagram or a consistent monthly reach on TikTok videos.
If your brand has a stronger social media brand than a competitor, it could be the factor that pushes through a sale.
Setting social media goals adds an element of certainty to your marketing activities.
It’s like preloading your GPS for a long trip, highlighting fuel stops, snack breaks, and overnight stays along the way. You know exactly where you’re going, how long it will take, and what to expect along the way.
Running social media accounts without goals is like setting off on a cross-country journey without a GPS or knowing where to refuel and rest. You’re bound to run into issues.
Carefully establishing your social media goals helps your business:
- post with purpose and strategy,
- justify marketing spend,
- make data-driven decisions,
- determine the return on investment (ROI),
- and synchronize social media and general marketing activities.
It’s no longer enough to simply have a social media presence. Marketers increasingly rely on social media to relay messages, reach different demographics, and, ultimately, generate revenue.
Goals take the ambiguity out of social media and demonstrate exactly how it’s being used to service the business.
Below, we take you through five examples of social media goals. You can use these ideas to create specific and measurable targets for your business.
1. Improve brand reputation
Social media is an important medium for building relationships. As your most direct link to the customer, it can be leveraged to gain trust and influence the attitudes toward your brand reputation.
Brand monitoring helps you to control the narrative and protect your reputation. Keeping an eye on social media mentions, brand-related keywords, hashtags, news pieces, blogs, and forum posts ensures you’re on the right track.
Tools that help you uncover post sentiments provide crucial insights into the effectiveness of your brand reputation campaign. For example, Keyhole’s Social Listening Analytics Suite tracks things like consumer perception, providing you with data that can be used to engage the audience and improve your reputation over time.
2. Drive website traffic
Many businesses get caught up on “vanity metrics”, such as likes or comments. While these figures are often positive, when isolated, they don’t necessarily indicate that you’re progressing toward your goals.
Social media goals should align with the broader objectives of your organization. This means linking your social media goals to external platforms, like your website. For product or service-based businesses, social media represents a channel along the overall sales funnel that directs potential customers to your site.
Therefore, generating website traffic from social media could be an important goal.
In addition to measuring general traffic, you’ll want to determine whether it’s leading to sales and generating revenue. Success could also be measured in terms of email sign-ups or subscribers.
Key website traffic metrics will be specific to the individual business. Competitor benchmarking is an effective way to find a starting point and set realistic expectations.
3. Increase conversions
It’s estimated that businesses in the US will commit around 20.3% of their marketing budgets to social media in 2024. This data demonstrates a 100% increase in social media marketing spending over the past decade.
As any experienced marketer will tell you, it’s next to impossible to secure the budget you want without justification.
Social media goals and a matching road map show you what you need to spend to hit your targets. Thus, they can be used to justify your marketing budget for the quarter, year, or a specific campaign.
There’s no clearer way to demonstrate effective social media practices than through a high conversion rate. Depending on your business, a conversion could be an email sign-up, a newly registered user, or a literal sale.
If increasing conversions is the goal, your social media strategy becomes crystal clear. However, you must be careful not to come across as pushy. Remember, most people use social media to keep up with their families and fill their spare time, not necessarily to buy.
Most social media platforms now have built-in shopping tools for measuring conversions. You can also use your website analytics to monitor where conversions are coming from and what social media platforms are helping you reach your conversion goals.
4. Lead generation
If you’re not at the point where social media is converting followers, take a step back and focus on lead generation.
Essentially, this means using social media to obtain any information about your followers that could be used to follow up with them. Email addresses are typically the most valuable details.
You won’t always get a sale from a single interaction with a customer. However, if you can create a funnel through social media and offer value through a weekly newsletter or monthly email blast, your leads will make a significant impact on the bottom line in the long term.
Facebook and TikTok are among the most effective lead generation platforms at the moment. Facebook contests are a novel way to generate leads when done the right way. TikTok’s algorithm and propensity for going viral make it easier to reach a larger audience.
Data-driven businesses are three times more likely to record significant benefits in decision-making when compared to organizations that don’t utilize as much data.
This isn’t exactly rocket science.
Analyzing data to form the basis of decision-making removes the guesswork. It gives you greater control over the performance and outcome of your activities. Data-based decision-making is based on proof and evidence, often leading to better quality processes and results.
One of the most important marketing activities in 2024 is social listening. Social listening is a process whereby you monitor the online dialogue surrounding your business and industry and use it to gain key insights and drive your business strategy.
A great example of social listening is Ben & Jerry’s Netflix and Chill’d product launch. After gaining insights that there was a demand for ice cream during winter Netflix binges, Ben and Jerry’s developed new flavors to take advantage.
Keyhole’s social listening tool gives you access to your mentions (direct and indirect), relevant hashtags, industry influencers, and keywords on one platform, giving you instant access to insights.
The tool is trusted by Google, Spotify, Amazon, and other major companies, demonstrating its usefulness and scalability across a range of industries. Make social listening a priority with your social media strategy in 2024.
Understanding the importance of social media goals and setting them are two very different things.
Next, we’ll cover exactly how you should go about setting goals. Then, we’ll take a deep dive into the keys to achieving them.
1. Consult the company’s wider strategic goals
Social media goals should align with the broader strategic objectives of an organization.
If increasing revenue is the single most important objective of a company, the social media strategy should reflect this.
Sure, it’s nice to have an engaged audience and tons of followers, but if your social media channels don’t help convert, are they helping you toward your goal? Probably not.
2. Refine goals until they’re clear and concise
Once you’ve defined the general goals of the organization, break them down into more concise targets. Establish milestones along the way to help carve a path toward your goal.
This approach makes each goal more digestible and easier to track.
If your goal is to collect a ten leads through your website landing page within the coming week, you know what you are aiming towards.
Once you’re aware of this, you can focus on optimizing your landing page to maximize your chances of reaching this target. This could be adding a live chat widget or including a 24/7 phone number customers can reach out to if they have questions.
But goal-setting is the starting point.
3. Establish KPIs
Armed with your goals, the next step is to assign key performance indicators (KPIs) that help you manage progress. Every goal should have its own set of KPIs.
Important KPIs for hitting this goal would include:
- post and page impressions,
- post and page engagements,
- click-throughs to the company website,
- post reach,
- and follower count.
These KPIs will show whether the content is hitting the mark.
4. Measure your progress and adjust
If you don’t measure the progress of each goal, your hard work to this point may be wasted. Tracking campaigns over time is where all the learning occurs.
If you aim to increase followers but there’s no movement after a couple of months, perhaps you need to change your approach.
On the other hand, if you’re overshooting your targets, you could consider adjusting them to make them more ambitious.
Initially, it’s normal to be slightly off the mark with your goals. However, by paying attention to the metrics and measuring your progress, you can make adjustments that’ll get you to your desired outcome.
Keyhole has an intuitive dashboard to help with just that.
It can help you monitor numerous goals based on how you decide to customize your dashboard and what is important to your company. This could mean monitoring social listening and campaigns or analyzing profile growth and engagement.
Goal setting seems simple on paper but many businesses fail to establish them properly.
The SMART approach is one of the most popular frameworks for businesses (and individuals) that truly want to achieve their goals.
Let’s break down the five-step approach.
1. Specific
Goals must be specific and clearly defined. Any ambiguity may cause you to stray off course and ultimately, fail. Ensure your goals are simple and absolute.
2. Measurable
Good goals are those that you can measure. This means you can track their progress and analyze your company’s performance relating to them.
3. Achievable
Goals must be achievable within your resources. Consider the hours, capital, and other resources necessary to reach your goal, and make sure they fall within your company’s restraints.
4. Relevant
Don’t get sucked into vanity metrics if they don’t contribute to the bigger plan. Make sure your goals are relevant.
5. Time-bound
Finally, your goals should have an expiry date. Assign each goal a set deadline for completion, whether it’s a month or a year. This approach allows you to plan accordingly, create a realistic timeline, and work with a sense of urgency.
Wrapping up
Regardless of the scope of your business or the services you sell, setting SMART social media goals can help you realize success in the digital sphere.
SMART goals make processes clearer and show you the necessary steps to make progress, whether you aim to boost revenue or improve your brand awareness.
Keyhole is an all-encompassing social media analytics tool that can help your business monitor mentions and other key metrics. Plus, it lets you analyze profiles, campaigns, and influencers, leading to better social media performance.
If you want to reshape your social media, get your Keyhole free trial today.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Increasing brand awareness, engagement with your brand, and generating leads are often considered to be the three most important social media goals that companies go after.
A social media objective is the goal you wish to achieve by using social media for your business. This could be generating interest in your brand, finding leads for your business, or interacting with your customers to create loyalty.
Some social media objective examples would look like:
-Increasing website traffic generated through social media by 20%.
-Increasing brand awareness through social media.
-Finding 10 leads every week that come through social media.