8 Key SoMe Goals and How to Track Them

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September 2, 2019

For newcomers in the social media world, such as fresh-out of college marketing professionals or personalities, it can prove quite the challenge to get to know the online space. Moreover, when delving into marketing activities, it is not only hard to choose the right approach, but also to figure out how to measure and follow-up. To make this a bit easier, we have prepared a little guide with eight essential SoMe goals for some of the famous channels. In this article, we will mention the main, most widely used platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. 

Setting SMART SoMe goals

It will be surprising if you are up to date and you have not heard about the SMART Goals Model, as it is so widely used in marketing. The acronym stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. The purpose of this framework is to guide professionals in goal-setting.

This tool can prove to be effective and give marketers a clarity on what it is they are aiming to achieve. Moreover, as time is one of its key features, it often pushes its users to be more time-effective and plan their actions for success.Continue reading to find out which SMART goals we believe should be implemented in your social media strategy. Read about the 8 key SoMe goals bellow. 

SoMe Goal #1: Create Brand Awareness

One of the most common goals for marketers using social media is to create brand awareness for their organization online. Companies want to be recognizable for their current and potential clients, and social media is a great tool for doing that. Depending on your target market, the different platforms provide different possibilities.

Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are preferable medias for achieving brand awareness in the case of B2C companies, as they give its users the opportunity to not only advertise their products and services but bring attention to the values of the company, its employees and what it stands for. On the other hand, LinkedIn and Twitter can be used for more professional branding, in which the focus is on networking and the achievements of the organization. Moreover, the difference in both cases is underlined by the content shared in order to achieve the goal. Yet, all companies want to present themselves as knowledgeable in their craft, with great product/service and values, as well as good customer service.

Brand recognition is a hard metric to measure due to its abstract nature. Moreover, it is based on the customer’s opinion, which can prove to be a challenge to collect. Ways to figure out if your activities are successful is through customer surveys, checking if the traffic to your website comes from keywords and search volume data, as well as social listening.

 SoMe Goal #2: Increase Customer Loyalty

While the number of your followers and brand recognition are key metrics and help a company understand the extent of their influence on clients, there are other aspects of the relationship, which is also important to follow. Customer Loyalty has many benefits to offer, as it increases the chance or re-purchase, recommendations, and advocacy. However, the company has to continuously meet the needs of the customer, keep their interest, and nurture their relationship. 

It can be established by close communication, feedback and adaptation to the trends in the industry, and customer needs. To measure it, companies should use social listening and track their recommendations, re-purchases, and engagements.

SoMe Goal #3: Higher Content Reach

As social media content is distributed through different algorithms, it can prove to be a challenge to accelerate your reach and therefore, your follower count.

Algorithms often change, which makes them hard to predict and marketers need to research and adapt to them. Share on X

Instagram, YouTube, and recently, Facebook have introduced new algorithms, which increase the reach of promotional posts and make organic reach harder for its users. Therefore, finding out what works for your company and adapting can prove to be not only beneficial but cost-effective.

The key measures to track your success are the reach, views per posts, and profile visits.

SoMe Goal #4: Boost ROI

ROI stands for return on investment. To maximize your efficiency, you should aim for your campaigns to give you more than you have invested in them, or at least to cover your expenses. It is important to follow the development of your ROI and to increase it over time, as there is no point in maintaining campaigns, which do not support your growth.

It is essential to measure not only your ROI but also the new followers, likes, page visits, and sales coming from a campaign, as those are the key outcomes of your marketing efforts. By knowing in which way you achieve the most, you will be able to focus your budget on effective practices and prevent monitory leaks.

SoMe Goal #5: Increase Sales and Generate Leads

Another important goal to set is increase in sales and potential customers. While the marketing of your brand and brand awareness are great for business, the most important thing is the sale. A marketers first priority should be not only making a brand recognizable and generating new followers but converting all of those people into potential clients. This process can be quite different depending on the target market however, it is essential for the development of every organization.

While we are all aware of what a sale is, “lead” is a word of discussion. It is widely described as followers or people familiar with the company. Moreover, individuals who already had an encounter with it and had provided it with some personal information or had an interest in the product. One way of reaching this goal is through advertising and sponsored posts. Even though most social media channels provide opportunities for this, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube are well known for their effective options.

Attracting potential clients can also be done through content campaigns, games and giveaways, as well as more overall interactions, and calls to action for your followers. Share on X

When having this goal in mind, it will be important to track your engagement and conversion rate, reach and website visits, but also the personal data collected through social media, rate of downloaded content and clicks on lead-generation posts. 

SoMe Goal #6: Improve Customer Service

Customer service is one of the key touch-points between a customer and an organization. Therefore, its development is essential for nurturing a good relationship and providing post-purchase services. Facebook has proven to be a good platform to use for improvements in your customer service and interaction with clients. Starting from chatbots and reviews to engagement in posts, there are many ways to reach your audience directly. Companies also use Instagram and Twitter for this communication.

Having an informative page, fast response rate, and good reviews can be vital for many customers when they are in their decision-making process.

Frequent scrutiny of the feedback your customers are giving you is the first step to satisfying their needs and living up to their expectations. Other aspects that can be tracked are the number of support questions, the response time, and the customer satisfaction score. 

SoMe goal #7: Drive Traffic

Most companies aim to re-direct their followers and visitors to a website or blog of their own, where the customer can get to know the product or service and reach a purchase decision. Almost all well-known social media channels can be a great way for your company to re-direct traffic to a page of your own. Indeed all, except Instagram, provide not only the option for including a website in your page description but also in posts.

Good metrics to follow in order to keep track of your traffic are the traffic from social media, bounce rate (quality of traffic), and clicks on social media posts.

SoMe goal #8: Grow Community Engagement

Engagement is the second most frequently cited reason why marketers use social media. Put simply, online engagement is a two-way interaction between profiles and followers in which one of them reaches out and gets a response from the other one. On most platforms, it can manifest itself as public shares, likes, or comments. Moreover, it is found to bring many benefits to companies doing digital marketing. Those include increased brand recognition, loyalty, and recommendations.

Every platform provides calculates engagements by different criteria. Additionally, provide numerous ways of interacting not only between you and your customers but them communicating with one another.

To summarize, there are many types of goals a company can choose for itself, and the ones listed below are just our picks. Therefore, it is important to address the bigger picture in your organization and the direction it is aiming at.

We hope this introduction to the world of social media goals have been useful. This is a very broad topic we intend to expand on in the future. Therefore, let us know in the comments below, which are the topics you are most interested in reading more about and don’t forget to follow us to get updated when we post new content.

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