Building your brand’s social media presence is an exciting step in your marketing journey, and it can be tempting to dive right into posting. However, it’s important to take the time and set social media goals for your business. This helps ensure your posts reach the right audience and generate results for your brand.
The SMART framework is a great place to start when setting goals for your social media strategy. SMART goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound, and they’ll help you build a roadmap to social media success.
Let’s discuss why social media marketing goals are so important, as well as ways to set effective goals for your organization.
Why goals matter in social media marketing
The current social media landscape is vast and complex, and if you’re navigating it for the first time, feeling overwhelmed is understandable. Trends come and go quickly, and consumers move between different social media platforms as their interests change. Learning how to run a successful social media campaign often takes trial and error.
Setting goals can help you determine where your brand fits in this landscape. If you don’t set goals, it can feel like you’re sending your posts out into the ether with no guarantee that anyone will see or interact with them. Setting goals can help you build a strategy that focuses on the right demographics and appeals to potential customers for better results.
A goal-driven strategy will also help you differentiate yourself from the competition. Assessing where you stand in relation to your competitors is a huge part of goal setting—you’ll need to find your unique niche to avoid being overshadowed.
Setting goals will also help keep your social media marketing strategy on track. For many marketers, social media is just one part of digital marketing operations, and it’s easy to let it fall by the wayside. Your goals are a helpful reminder that your daily work on social media is part of a bigger picture, and by executing your strategy, you’re committed to reaching them.
Examples of common social media goals and objectives
Your social media goals should be highly tailored to your larger business objectives. However, if you’re new to social media marketing, you might need some ideas to help you get started. Here are some examples of common goals for social media campaigns.
Increasing brand awareness
If your brand has just hit the market, there’s a good chance that your target audience doesn’t know who you are yet. Posting regularly on the right social media channels can help you increase brand awareness, which can ultimately lead to more customers. Nielsen research indicates that a one-point gain in brand awareness drives a 1% increase in sales.
There are many ways to use social media to boost your brand awareness and stand out. If you’re working toward this goal, you can get creative with your campaigns. Pay attention to social media trends and focus on creating buzzworthy, shareable content.
Hashtags are also a very effective tool for increasing brand awareness. Research trending hashtags that are relevant to your brand and include them in your post captions. Social media analytics tools like Hootsuite, Later, or Sprout Social can help you find good up-and-coming hashtags. Once your brand starts getting online attention, you can even create your own hashtags to generate engagement.
When you’re working toward this goal, it can be tricky to track your progress, as brand awareness is a very broad concept. One way is to use analytics tools to see how many people have seen your posts or visited your profile. With this information, you can identify traffic patterns and fine-tune your marketing strategy.
Another way to do this is by including shortened Bitly links to your website in your social media profile or in your posts. With Bitly Analytics, you’ll be able to see how many people are visiting your short links, where they’re located, and what type of device they’re using.
Boosting engagement
Another popular goal is boosting engagement with your social media posts. If your posts and your profile get plenty of views but don’t get many likes, comments, or follows, this could be a good goal to work toward.
To generate more social media engagement, focus on making your content more interactive. The most engaging content encourages other followers to share their opinions and experiences. This could be through polls, quizzes, or a timely post on a hot topic.
You can also use video content to boost your online engagement. One way to do this is by hosting regular live streams. Other social media users can comment on your live streams in real time, which makes them the perfect conversation starter.
Another exciting engagement-boosting strategy is working with influencers to create user-generated content (UGC). By sharing your brand and products in their videos, you’re opening your brand up to a whole new audience. Eighty-seven percent of businesses say that UGC helps increase their sales, making this a proven strategy for generating engagement.
Over time, this engagement can turn into a unique online community. To track your progress, monitor your engagement rate across all the social media platforms you use.
Driving website traffic
A well-built social media strategy is one of the most effective ways to drive traffic to your company’s website. Setting this goal can help you build brand loyalty and interact with your followers in new ways. Your social media posts can serve as the first step in a larger marketing funnel, sending followers to specific blog posts, product pages, or contact forms.
In order for social media posts to translate to website traffic, you’ll need to give your followers a good reason to navigate off-platform. Each post should include a strong call to action highlighting the benefits of visiting your website, whether that’s a new product release, exclusive discounts, or a must-read blog post.
To send traffic from your social media accounts to your website, your posts should spark curiosity, encouraging readers to seek more information that isn’t readily available on your profile. Track your progress by using Bitly links alongside other helpful third-party analytics tools like Google Analytics to measure your click-through rate. This will help you determine which types of content are most effective at boosting website traffic.
Generating leads or sales
For established brands, using social media to generate more leads or sales is a popular goal. To reach this goal, you’ll need to integrate your social media content with your broader sales funnel and your CRM tools. With Bitly links, you can see how many customers are interacting with your sales and lead-gen content—including sign-up form pages or promo landing pages.
You can even pair them with UTM parameters to see how much traffic is coming to those pages from various social media platforms. This can give you valuable insights into which platforms may be the most lucrative in terms of generating leads.
To implement lead generation on social media, you’ll need to take advantage of each platform’s targeted ad options. With targeted ads, you can reach users who match your target demographics or have expressed interest in similar products before. Seventy-six percent of social media users have purchased something they saw on social media, making these platforms an increasingly popular way to shop.
You can also use targeting technology to share exclusive offers and link directly to your products. Use customized Bitly short links with UTM parameters for each campaign—this will help you determine which content types are most effective.
How to create your own social media goals
To set goals for your social marketing strategy, you’ll need to take a comprehensive look at your business and what you want to achieve. It’s important to set realistic goals, which is why the SMART methodology is so effective. Here’s how to set social media goals that translate to real results.
1. Identify your social media baseline
Before you can set goals, you need to assess where your brand currently stands with social media. Are you starting your accounts from scratch, or do you already have a profile with followers? If you’ve run social media campaigns in the past, what was effective, and what would you change?
You should also look at your current social media metrics to set a baseline for your performance. Observe your follower count, likes, and comments over a set period of time and use that information to calculate averages. You’ll use these averages to track your progress later.
2. Define what success means for your brand
The next step is to determine what social media success might look like for your brand. This could vary widely depending on your industry and target demographics. For some brands, success might look like reaching a high follower count and creating viral moments. For others, success could be consistently hitting certain engagement metrics with a smaller group of followers.
Be as specific as possible when defining what success would look like and what metrics you’d use to define it. For example, success could look like increased engagement with a consistent number of likes, follows, and shares or increasing your web traffic with higher click-through rates. This concept of success should fit with your broader business needs and goals.
3. Use the SMART criteria for goal-setting
The SMART criteria is a framework that can help you set effective and attainable goals for your brand. While you can use SMART criteria to set any goals, this approach works particularly well for social media.
SMART goals are:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Relevant
- Time-bound
A SMART social media goal could look something like this: “Increase Instagram follower count by 20% within six months” or “Boost average post engagement rate to 5% by the end of Q4.” Both of these goals are very specific and easy to measure using social media management tools and include a specific time frame. To find achievable and relevant goals, reference your social media baseline and the concept of success that you’ve previously defined.
4. Align goals with your content strategy
There are so many different types of content you can put out on social media, and your goals should heavily inform your content strategy. For example, if you’re trying to figure out how to increase social media engagement, your content strategy should be interactive and focus on starting a discussion. If your goal is to boost sales, focus on promoting your content to your audience more directly.
Use a scheduling tool to create a timeline for your posts and keep your social media strategy organized. This will help you plan when each post will go out, and you can align them with holidays and major current events to stay relevant. These social media marketing tools can help you allocate resources appropriately for paid ad spend, and you can adjust your strategy in real time as you learn what works and what doesn’t.
5. Monitor key metrics
Once you’ve launched your social media strategy, you’ll need to monitor key metrics like engagement, number of followers, and click-through rates. By tracking these metrics closely, you’ll get an idea of which types of posts are most effective. Once you learn what types of content your followers respond to, you can fine-tune your social media efforts for even better results in the future.
6. Use relevant tools like Bitly
Using the right tools is a must when developing your social media strategy. Find tools that integrate directly with your social media profiles—they can provide highly valuable data and insights. Use this information to see how your performance compares to the goals you’ve set.
For example, you can use Bitly’s link shortener to create branded short links for your social media profiles and posts. These short links are completely trackable, so you can use them to track traffic from your social media pages to your website and other digital assets.
7. Pivot and refine your strategy
It’s unlikely that you’ll nail your social media strategy on the first try, and that’s okay. As you collect data from your posts, you can use this information to refine your strategy and set new goals for the future.
For example, you might find that you get more interaction from video content than static posts. You could then make video content the pillar of your social media strategy moving forward.
Let Bitly help you meet your social media goals faster
Setting the right goals will help your brand make a bold impression on social media. Whether your objective is to boost engagement, generate warm leads, or simply to increase brand awareness, specific, measurable goals keep you on track. With the right strategy for designing your goals, the right metrics in place to measure your success, and the right tools, your business can meet (and exceed) your social media goals faster.
Bitly has the tools you need to turn social media engagement into website traffic with ease. Bitly’s branded links fit perfectly into the limited space of a social media bio or caption. With Bitly’s advanced analytics, you can track traffic from your social media profiles to your website as you work toward your social media goals.
Get started with Bitly and see how we can be your partner in hitting your social media goals!