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.