4 Social Media Goals To Set For Your Business

 A key part of building a successful social media strategy for your business is knowing the goals you hope to reach. Without goals, it’s hard to know if your efforts with social media are really paying off, as well, it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly where improvements could be made. To help shed a light on the subject, we’re detailing a few social media goals you can set for your own business, to help your team start to see results from the resources they use.

4 Social Media Goals To Set For Your Business

1. Drive traffic to your website

Everyone wants to drive more traffic to their website, but this is especially the case if you are selling online. With that in mind, driving traffic to your website is one of the most important goals you should be implementing in your social media strategy. Although there are many other factors that can influence conversions— users who visit your website, consume your content and interact with your brand are more likely to convert. And, if used correctly, social media can become a great driver of traffic to your website, and really help you to enhance your online business. The great thing about this goal is that it is measurable— and Google Analytics is one of the best tools for monitoring exactly where your web traffic is coming from, and you can even break the data down to see which platforms are performing best.

2. Increase brand awareness

It really goes without saying— brand awareness is one of the top reasons brands and businesses use social media. And it only makes sense, in today’s digital age, social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter and Facebook are some of the best places to grab and hold the attention of consumers. To ensure your efforts are paying off, it’s important to monitor the insights for each of the platforms that you spend time and effort curating content for. Are your followers growing? Are you reaching a wide audience? How many people are talking about your brand online? When you start to closely analyse this data, it helps you to streamline your social media strategy further. When you don’t see the results you hoped for, it pinpoints where you should make improvements to increase your brand’s online presence.

3. Satisfactory customer support

The popularity of social media is only on the increase, and so it only makes sense that a large portion of consumers turn to social media for customer support nowadays, as opposed to the traditional methods of calling or emailing. And, it’s likely that this will only continue. With that in mind, having impressive customer support on social media can do wonders in enhancing customer satisfaction, retention and it can even help to increase revenue. If you fail to respond quickly to customers via social media, or worse, approach it rudely or abrasively, it can be extremely detrimental to your business’ name in the public eye.

4. Build a community around your business

This social media goal relates back to increasing your brand awareness but takes it another step further. Monitoring the growth of followers and reach is great, and certainly something that should be done. However, in recent years, there has been a rise in brands and businesses focusing on building engagement and community around their business in the form of Twitter chats, hashtags on Instagram, Facebook groups. This, in turn, helps to enhance customer satisfaction and retention, and works wonders in making your brand memorable. This can be monitored in a number of ways, depending on the type of community you choose to build. If it is an Instagram hashtag, how many people are using it in their own posts? If it is a Twitter chat, how engaged are users in your chats each time? Asking such questions helps to gauge whether the effort to build a community is paying off.

Written by Katy Mairs, blog editor at NI Parcels & Irish Parcels.

The Questions to Ask Before You Commit Budget to Social Media Goals

Most businesses set a social media goal, put a number next to it, and hand it to whoever runs the accounts. That's backwards. Before a penny of budget moves, you need answers to a specific set of questions. If you can't answer them, you're not ready to spend, you're guessing.

Here's what to ask first.

• What business metric does this goal move? If the answer is "more followers" or "more engagement" and nothing else, stop. Followers and likes don't pay invoices. Ask how this goal connects to leads, sales, retention, or cost reduction. If nobody in the room can draw that line, the goal isn't a goal, it's an activity.
• What happens if we hit the target? Say the goal is 500 leads from LinkedIn this quarter. Does sales have capacity to follow up on 500 leads? Is there a nurture sequence ready? A lot of budget gets wasted chasing a number that, if achieved, the business can't use.
• What's the realistic cost per outcome, based on past data, not hope? If you've never run paid social before, you don't have this number, and that's fine, but say so out loud. Set a test budget instead of a full commitment, and agree what "working" looks like before you spend a cent.
• Which platform reaches this audience, and do we have proof, not assumption? Decision makers often pick the platform they personally use rather than the one their customers use. Ask for evidence: where do current customers say they spend time, where have competitors had traction, what do the platform's own audience insights show.
• Who owns this once budget is approved? Vague ownership is where social budgets quietly disappear. One person needs to be accountable for reporting back against the goal, not just posting content.
• What's the minimum time horizon before we judge this a failure or success? Social, especially organic, rarely shows results in two weeks. Agree the review point in advance so nobody kills a campaign early out of impatience, or keeps funding one out of sunk cost.
• What are we NOT doing because we're doing this? Budget and attention are finite. If social spend is going up, something else is going down. Name it before you commit, so it's a decision and not a surprise later.

None of these questions are complicated. They're just uncomfortable, because the honest answers often expose that a goal was set to look active rather than to move the business forward. Asking them before budget commits saves the awkward conversation three months later about why the spend didn't do anything.

FAQ

Who should be in the room when these questions get asked?

Whoever owns the budget, whoever owns the metric the goal is meant to move (sales, customer service, whoever), and whoever will run the social activity. Leaving out any one of these three is how goals get set that nobody can execute or measure .

What if we don't have data to estimate cost per outcome?

Say that plainly and set a small test budget with a fixed end date, rather than committing a full quarter's spend on a guess. Treat the test as the answer-finding exercise it is, and agree upfront what result would justify further spend.

How often should these questions get revisited, not just asked once?

At minimum every quarter, and any time the goal, platform, or budget changes significantly. A goal that made sense with last year's team, budget, or platform algorithm might not make sense now, and the only way to catch that is to ask again, not assume the original answers still hold.