Social Media Goals For Business In 2022

Have you set your business goals for social media this year?  If not, there’s always time as it’s never too late to set goals for social media marketing that focus on consumer engagement, branding, website traffic, and sales.   So let’s look at how to go about creating the right goals for your business’s social media presence.

Our earlier blog on resolutions for the new year covered how to make sure your goals succeed using the SMART criteria.  When goals are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timebound they’re off to a great start.  However, this is not the end of your work, it’s just the beginning.

How To Achieve A Goal

To achieve a goal, you need to take action, measure outcomes, tweak your strategy and repeat time and time again until you reach optimum performance, and then only stop when your goal has been achieved.

Setting social media goals is done by you on behalf of your business however they’re influenced by your followers and customers.

Customer-centric Reporting

Start with reviewing your social media marketing progress to date. Seek to understand the conversion i.e. comments, likes, and clicking on the links you’ve shared, including the links to your website.  It may surprise you that many businesses have no understanding of their performance in social media and as such do not know if their investment in time and resources on Facebook, or LinkedIn is delivering results.

The performance reports provide feedback on conversions including the number of comments, likes, shares, visits to your website.   This data together with more granular data on your audience can help your business understand your audience. With knowledge of your customer preferences, you can work out what action triggers interaction.

Is it your customer support or your sharing of market insights prompting comments from your followers?  When you’re aware of the activity that gets conversions you can create specific marketing campaigns to attract more.  Your marketing campaigns are the tasks you do to reach your goals.

Goal Setting Frameworks

Hootsuite says once you’ve analyzed your performance, and used a goal-setting framework like SMART and OKR (objectives and key results) then you’ll know what you want to track.

The OKR framework is said to be favored by Google where the ‘realistic’ component is not so strict.  The focus with OKR is to push the boundaries in all areas and by doing so you’re likely to exceed beyond SMART goals.  Achieving just 70% of the goal is considered a good outcome under the OKT framework.

Both frameworks are useful, as you’ll find some goals need to be specific and measurable for the investment to continue.  For example, increasing website visits. Growing an audience in Facebook takes time and money and the reward is in conversions of which one is website visits.  Setting a target for website visits is a goal that’s specific in much the same way you measure the conversions from PPC advertising.

Areas That Need Goals

In social media, marketers want to grow a community of followers, and a customer database, generate leads, and also improve communication, brand awareness, and reputation.  These are the areas that need goals.

Brand Awareness & Reputation

Seek to understand the mentions of your brand.  Analyze the reporting for shares, and visits to your website.   Review comments so you can manage any negative feedback.

Communication

Companies are realizing social media is where customers seek answers.  Waiting in a queue online or on the phone is time-consuming and frustrating.  Twitter is used by many service providers for customer support and their response times are much faster than traditional sources of contact including the ubiquitous chat bot.

Hosting providers can be hard to get hold of when you most need them, however, in our experience, they’re active on social media and it makes sense too as answering your question is sure to be seen by other customers who may benefit from the reply in the feed.

Recruitment, Leads, Sales

The goals for attracting candidates, leads, and sales are similar.  You will need to measure conversions (i.e. clicks to webpages that have the call to action including online applications, sign-up pages, and eCommerce store visits).  When you’re investing in social media advertising also measure the cost per click (CPC) and cost per mille (CPM).

Customer Insights

Another goal should be set for customer insights.  Today marketing and advertising are driven by customer insights and how much is known about their preferences.  With greater insight into your targeted audience, your sales campaigns can be more personalized and your business will achieve a higher ROI.