Why You Need Social Media Goals To Win (And How To Successfully Measure Them)
Guest Blog by Rene Ricardo Bernal. You can't manage what you don't measure. As a business or even as an individual, you should be aware of the importance of goal-setting. Successful entrepreneurs and achievers set goals to have a better understanding of their long-term vision and use it as a fuelling motivation for success. With that in mind, goals should be established with every business move, including social media marketing. Now, just having a social media presence isn’t enough. Before establishing any sort of online account, you must determine what the main goal of exploiting a specific channel is in the digital world. Executing without a purpose is just as bad as not executing at all. So let’s talk about why goal-setting is important, and explore some of the most popular goals, metrics, and tracking tools available for you to maximize ROI. Contrary to this popular belief, you actually need to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your business, get an insight into how you’re performing in your field, and then determine your desired objectives. This in turn will help you define which social media platform(s) is best suited in achieving your goals and reaching your long-term vision.
How To Set Your Goals
Goal-setting for your social media marketing strategy will help you shape and define which path you must take to be successful, because without it, it’s difficult to keep track of how your online strategy is performing and what adjustments are required to ensure progress. Beyond a simple marketing tool, social media can affect every aspect of your business. Through different channels, the various social platforms will assist in guaranteeing that you get the most out of the time and resources invested into your online presence. Before launching any social media blitz, you’ll need to set goals that are clear, concise, and achievable. Don’t know where to start? Here are some popular goals that you can use to track success depending on your vision.
Brand Awareness
The most common and popular goal of social media marketing is increasing brand awareness. Today, the digital realm is the ideal location to grab your consumer’s attention. Social channels are critical to staying relevant to your audience, and establishing a strong online presence for your brand keeps consumers engaged and potentially leads to conversions. Key metrics to track: number of followers you have, your reach/impressions and engagement (mentions, shares, likes and comments).
Increase In Engagement
Another goal businesses aspire to achieve is an increase in engagement. With all the investment and time dedicated to content creation, you should aim to keep your audience interested and constantly interacting with you online. Increased engagement translates into positive brand perception, loyalty, and promotes word of mouth. Social media algorithms prioritize posts and publishers that generate high engagement, making them appear at the top of the user’s feed; which is why engagement is such an important goal for social media marketers. Key metrics to track: Website traffic and number of interactions on your posts (clicks, mentions, shares, likes and comments) and how they increase over time. We love to track link clicks using URL shorteners like bit.ly to give us more insight into where the clicks are coming from.
Lead Generation
Another popular ambition for most businesses is to generate new leads. Social media gives you the ability to reach a lot of people, making it a great tool to gather information for potential customers, initiate the sales process and convert these leads from followers to buyers. Key metrics to track: The amount of personal or contact information collected, how many people downloaded your content, audience participation in contests or events that require sharing contact information, and conversions which can be tracked via Google Analytics.
How To Track Your Goals
Now that the goals are set and metrics are defined, how do you keep track of them? Luckily, there are several tools available for you to monitor how you’re performing online. It’s critical that you keep track of the data so you can forecast and adjust to successfully achieve your goal. Social media platforms are equipped to provide insights on different metrics but it’s always recommended to combine a social media management tool to get a more accurate and detailed representation of the data you want to analyze. Several social media monitoring tools are at your disposal to do so. Buffer is a great tool to track brand awareness as it provides insight on follower growth and reach on different platforms. With this tool, you’re also able to keep track of your engagement performance. By viewing all social media posts, you can identify which ones have generated high engagement, which will in turn help you to better curate your content to reach your goal. Sprout Social is another tool designed to monitor and build reports on various metrics. With an easy-to-use interface, it’s a one-stop shop to schedule, monitor, and analyze all social media posts. It also allows you to follow social conversations providing opportunities to discover and engage with an audience, and optimizing your social marketing plans. Hootsuite is one of the most popular social media management tools in existence. It’s effective in monitoring social listening and scheduling posts for multiple social media platforms, all in one simple interface. With customized analytics report, you can analyze your performance and tweak your strategy. Google Analytics is designed to follow traffic. It’s highly effective when linked with websites and social media accounts to get a deeper insight on the metrics you’re following. Google Analytics provides data on referral traffic, the number of visits, bounce rate, demographic and more. This tool is quite effective in tracking new leads and following up on conversion goals. Often overlooked, goal-setting will not only provide an efficient social media strategy, but it will also generate ideas to create content. Using the right tools to track and measure success will make it easier to achieve breakthroughs, complete short-term objectives, steer your business in the right direction, and ensure its long-term success. Go get ‘em.
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