Social Media Goals That Drive the Results You Desire

Everybody have social media goals; there’s no avoiding it. It’s our number one place to stay connected to friends, family, colleagues, news, and, most notably, to marketers, companies, and brands.

Brands use social media marketing to connect with their audience and even reduce friction for their buyers to reach their products or services. Consumers also expect businesses to be online ready and waiting to answer their inquiries and solve their pain points.

There are now more than 2.3 billion active social media users, making social media an unavoidable part of your marketing strategy. Unlike the past, where marketers blindly advertised and hoped for the best, social media provides your company the opportunity to engage with customers in real-time.

Why do social media marketing goals matter?

Clear social media goals give you a target to aim for and can help you get buy-in from your manager or other stakeholders.

Well-made social media marketing goals will also help you:

• manage your budget,
• structure and streamline your workflow,
• prove your marketing’s return on investment,
• and align your social media activity with your organization’s broader business objectives.

Social Media Goals

1. Build brand awareness

One of the most common social media goals for businesses is to build brand awareness. Social media is a great place to build brand awareness because many people spend their time scrolling through their feeds and looking at posts. It means that if someone follows your business on social media, they can get exposed to your brand as they scroll through their feed.

Brand awareness is a great goal to set because it’s a fundamental part of earning conversions. People need to know who you are and what you do before purchasing your products or using your services.

2. Increase traffic to your website

Social media marketing goals aren’t limited to actions that happen on social. Your website is a key player in your social media strategy. This matters whether you’re trying to drum up sales or move people down your social media marketing funnel. 

Measuring website traffic in analytics is relatively simple. However, here are some of the top metrics you should keep an eye on:

• Traffic to your site. It’s obvious, but don’t forget to limit your reporting to the most relevant period. This can be daily, weekly or monthly. If you have a baseline number to compare traffic to, even better!
• Network referrals. Monitoring referrals can help you determine which platform is working best.
• Email sign-ups. Once your social traffic makes it to your website, are they signing up for more of your content?

3. Generate leads

Not every social media interaction will result in a sale — and that’s ok. If you want to fill your funnel with potential customers, you might want to set a goal to generate more social leads.

Lead-generating campaigns yield any information that helps you follow up with a social media user. That includes names, email addresses, occupations, employers, or other information they share. 

Leads are a specific kind of conversion. Because of this, the two goals are useful in similar situations. They’re also measured in similar ways. 

Generally speaking, Facebook is the best platform for generating leads. This edge comes from its massive audience size and sophisticated analytics tools.

4. Manage brand reputation

Next on our list of social media marketing goals is managing brand reputation. It may seem like this goal is similar to building brand awareness, but it’s slightly different. With managing brand reputation, you focus on analyzing and monitoring whether people say positive or negative things about your business.

With brand awareness, you’re focusing on helping as many people as possible to discover your brand. On the other hand, brand reputation management focuses on handling what people say about your brand and how they portray your brand on the web. Think of managing your brand as the second goal to brand awareness.

Once people are aware of your brand, you must monitor what they’re saying about you. Building a positive brand reputation is a goal many businesses set. If you think about companies with a more significant following, like Target or Walmart, they spend a lot of time managing their brand.

They’re already trusted, but they must consistently manage their brand reputation to maintain a positive image.