Social media isn’t only a marketing tool, it can affect almost every area of a business – for example, social media is a key channel for brand awareness, engagement, lead generation, customer support and much more.
If you want to stay motivated and achieve more results for your company through social media, science recommends setting goals. But which goals should you set?
Below is a list of 9 ultra-effective social media goals to help you maximize your returns from social media:
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1. Increase Brand Awareness
Brand awareness is the top reason marketers use social media. It’s easy to understand why: The average person spends nearly two hours on social media every day, and therefore social media is one of the best places to grab consumers’ attention.
Social media has also enabled marketers to have a more quantitative understanding of their brand’s presence and reach in the online world. And now most social media platforms provide data on the reach of your content, allowing you to report your online presence more accurately.
Followers count – “How many people can you potentially reach?”
Reach of your social media posts – “How many people have do reach each day / week / month?”
Mentions, shares, and RTs – “How many people are talking about your brand or sharing your social media posts?”
2. Drive Traffic To Your Website
One step further from having a brand presence on social media is driving visitors to your website or blog, who might turn into your customers. Potential metrics to measure traffic:
Traffic from social media – “How many visitors are coming from your social media channels?”
Share of overall traffic – “How much of your overall traffic does social media account for?”
Bounce rate of social media traffic – “What is the quality of the traffic from social media?”
Clicks on your social media posts – “How well is the messaging of your social media posts?”
You can break this data down even further in Google Analytics by clicking on the ‘Social’ link and seeing which platforms were driving that traffic.
3. Generate new leads
Lead generation is typically used by companies with a long sales process, such as enterprise software companies. It’s a way of warming up potential customers to your business and getting them on the path to eventually buying. This “path” is called your sales funnel. With the huge number of people you can reach, social media can be a great tool for getting people to the top of your funnel (or warming them up to your business). Possible metrics to track lead generation:
Personal information (usually email addresses) collected through social media – “How many leads have you collected through social media?”
Downloads of your gated content – “How many people visited from social media and downloaded your gated content?”
Participation – “How many people participated in your social media contest or events and shared their information with you?”
Clicks on your lead-generation social media posts – “How well is your messaging on those posts?”
Conversions of leads from social media – “How good are the leads from social media?”
4. Grow revenue (by increasing signups or sales)
If you don’t have a long sales process, you can use social media to turn your audience into paying customers directly. For example, social media advertising, such as Facebook ads, is a becoming an increasingly popular strategy to boost sales.
Possible metrics to measure revenue growth:
Signups / Revenue – “How many sign ups or how much revenue is your social media channels bringing in?”
Revenue from ads – “How much revenue is your social media advertising bringing in?”
You could track revenue in Google Analytics by setting up a new goal conversion.
5. Boost brand engagement
Engagement is the second top reason why marketers use social media. And research has found that social media interactions improve brand perception, loyalty, and word of mouth recommendations. Furthermore, social media platforms algorithms, such as those on Facebook and Instagram, are prioritizing posts with higher engagement on their feeds due to the belief that users will be more interested in seeing highly engaging content.
To summarize, if you want people to see your social media posts, you have to produce engaging content and respond to your community.
Potential metrics to measure engagement:
Likes, shares, and comments per post – “How many people are interacting with your social media posts?”
Mentions and replies – “How many people are mentioning your brand, and how many have you replied to?”
Just like brand awareness metrics, you can manually track engagement metrics through the social media platforms themselves (Facebook Insights or Twitter analytics, for example) or you could use a social media analytics tool to help you.
6. Build a community around your business
Tracking audience numbers such as total followers and fans is great, but we’ve also noticed a rise in the number of closed communities and chats business have been focusing on over the past year-or-so. The types of goals you want to set for these communities may feel very different to your overall fan / follower growth goals and of course, the type of community you choose to build will have an effect on the metrics you choose to measure success by.
Here’s a list to get you started:Possible metrics to track community building:
For Facebook groups: Number of posts, likes, and comments – “How engaged is your community?”
For Twitter chats: Number of participants and tweets per participant – “How many people are involved in your Twitter chats, and how engaged are they?”
For Slack communities: Number of daily active users – “How many people are actively involved in your Slack community?”
7. Effective social customer service
Having a good customer service on social media can help to increase revenue, customer satisfaction score, and retention. The trend of people turning to social media for customer support will likely continue, and we think there’s still a huge opportunity for businesses to differentiate themselves from their competitors with great social media customer service.
Metrics to track your customer service effectiveness:
Number of support questions – “Is there a demand for social media customer support for your company?”
Response time – “How fast are you getting back to your customers?”
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) – “How satisfied are your customers with your service?”
8. Increase mentions in the press
Despite the fact that social media has enabled companies to own their news and share stories directly with their fans and followers across social media, the press and media can still drive significant results and PR still plays a key role in many businesses’ marketing strategies. This makes it easier to build relations with relevant publication journalists for getting press mentions and to build thought leadership in the industry.
Possible metrics to measure your PR success:
Potential reach – “How many people did a PR campaign potentially reach through social media?”
Shares and mentions – “How many people are sharing or talking about your thought leadership articles?”
Influencers – “How many and who are the influencers or journalists talking about your articles? What’s the size of their following?”
Outreach – “How many people are asking your company about industry-related questions? How many journalists are asking questions about your company through social media?”
9. Never miss a mention through social listening
Social media has brought businesses and their customers closer and now it is much easier for customers to share their feedback with companies than it ever has been before. It has become a common trend for customers to air their thoughts about products and companies on social media. By catching and replying to these posts, your customers will feel heard.
Possible metrics to measure social listening:
Customer conversations – “How many conversations have you had with your customers on social media?”
Suggestions or feedback from social media – “How many suggestions are you getting from your customers through social media?”
Product/content improvements made from those suggestions – “How many of the suggestions influenced your product development or content production?”
With the social media landscape moving so quickly, new goals and ways to measure success are regularly emerging. Feel free to contact us with any questions on your social media marketing, we are here to help.
Best Wishes,
POC Digital Marketing ID