Consider these SMART Social Media Marketing Goals for the year.
In April 2022, there are 4.65 billion active social media users worldwide, making up 58.7% of the global population. In total, the latest numbers suggest that the world should spend more than 12½ trillion hours online in 2022 alone. Social media matters.
While you don’t need to meet every social media goal listed to succeed, these objectives offer a solid starting point for a measurable marketing increase.
Goal 1: Increasing brand awareness
Goal 2: Driving website traffic
Goal 3: Getting more leads
Goal 4: Boosting user engagement
Goal 5: Improving customer service
Goal 6: Enhancing brand reputation
Goal 7: Creating more conversations
Goal 8: Understanding your customers
Goal 9: Tracking your mentions
What are SMART Goals?
SMART is a goal-setting acronym. It is a well-established tool that you can use to plan and achieve your goals. It stands for:
S — Specific
M — Measurable
A — Attainable
R — Relevant
T — Time-bound
9 Social Media Goals
Goal 1: Increasing Brand Awareness
Increasing brand awareness is all about getting the message out to potential customers. In practice, this means more than just posting content to social media — it’s about posting content to social media sites where it will be seen by your target audience.
Potential KPIs and metrics:
Total number of social channel followers
How many users are interacting with your content daily/weekly/monthly
The volume of shares, mentions, and retweets
Goal 2: Driving Website Traffic
Getting more traffic to your website from social media sources can help boost lead generation and sales conversion. Here, social analytics tools are useful for measuring key social metrics and how many unique visitors are viewing your site.
Potential KPIs and metrics:
Number of visitors referred from social media sites
Percentage of overall traffic from social media
The bounce rate of social traffic (how many users visit but don’t stay)
Goal 3: Getting More Leads
More leads mean more opportunities for sales. And while getting leads is typically part of the larger sales funnel process, social media offers a way to start collecting basic lead information.
Potential KPIs and metrics:
Contact information such as email addresses provided by customers
Downloads of content assets from social media links
Participation in social media events such as polls or contests
Goal 4: Boosting User Engagement
User engagement with your social posts is measured by actions such as comments, likes, and shares, and helps give a sense of how well your social media marketing is working to drive user interest.
Potential KPIs and metrics:
Post engagement rate — how many users interact with a post
Share rate — how many users choose to share your content
Time-based engagement — how many users share your content over a specific time period
Goal 5: Improving Customer Service
Customers come for the product or service but stay for your customer service. As a result, it’s worth evaluating your ability to ensure customer satisfaction via social channels.
Potential KPIs and metrics:
How quickly you respond to customer messages
The number of complaints or concerns received via social media
Overall satisfaction with your service, is often measured using an email or social survey
Goal 6: Enhancing Brand Reputation
If customers don’t trust your brand, they won’t buy what you’re selling. And social media makes it easier than ever for customers to share exactly what they’re thinking — good or bad — about your brand, making effective reputation management critical.
Potential KPIs and metrics:
Mentions — how often is your brand mentioned in any social media posts?
Hashtags — what are people saying about your brand with relevant hashtags related to your product or service?
Sentiment — what is the overall user sentiment toward your brand? Good? Bad? Impartial?
Goal 7: Creating More Conversations
Social media is, well — social. This means it’s a place for conversation and interaction, and if your brand can get in on the action, so much the better for your sales.
Potential KPIs and metrics:
Number of users making posts on your Facebook page or in your Twitter chats
Number of daily active users on platforms such as Slack
Number of reviews for your products or services on social platforms
Goal 8: Understanding Your Customers
The more you know about your customers, the better. By understanding what they’re looking for, what they want to avoid, and how they want brands to treat them, your team can better tailor marketing and sales messages to your target audience.
Potential KPIs and metrics:
The kinds of posts do your customers comment on
Their most common pain points (from mentions and hashtags)
Their expectations in terms of brand response time and marketing content
Goal 9: Tracking Your Mentions
This goal expands mention monitoring from customers to the press: Where is your brand getting noticed by industry publications or thought leaders (or is it getting mentioned at all?)
Potential KPIs and metrics:
The number of users who saw your PR campaign
Questions about your product or service from industry leaders or journals
Coverage from social media influencers
Social Media SMART Goals Examples
Now, let’s take two examples of social media marketing goals above and apply the SMART framework.
Driving Website Traffic
Specific: We want to drive more traffic to our website by increasing the number of referrals from social media sites.
Measurable: Our goal is a 10% increase in traffic from social media sites.
Attainable: Targeted content publishing last month saw a 3% increase in traffic from social sites.
Relevant: More website traffic means more users browsing our products and services.
Time-bound: Six months.
Boosting User Engagement
Specific: We want to increase the number of users that interact with our social media posts by creating more compelling content.
Measurable: Our goal is 30 shares per week.
Attainable: Our last engagement campaign saw a measurable increase in post comments.
Relevant: Increased user engagement leads to more hashtags and mentions and in turn drives more website traffic.
Time-bound: Two months.
Enhancing Brand Reputation
Specific: We want to enhance brand reputation by better understanding customer sentiment.
Measurable: Our goal is to increase positive brand mentions by 30%.
Attainable: Analysis of customer hashtags helped pinpoint key areas of frustration.
Relevant: Better brand reputation means increased customer trust and leads to more reliable conversion rates.
Time-bound: Four months.
—-
No matter your broader social media marketing objectives, SMART social media goals can help you succeed. At worst, you’ll learn from your mistakes!
