3 Steps to Setting Goals Around Your Social Media Accounts
As with many things in life, you can’t achieve success unless you know what that success looks like. Understanding your goals is the key to being able to plot a roadmap to achieving them.
One of my favourite sayings is ‘Fail to plan, plan to fail’, because success doesn’t often happen by accident. If you’re waiting for one of your blog posts to go viral, you might just be waiting a long time.
Most successful people you see online have a plan, a strategy and goals they want to achieve. Once they set their plan in place and actually do the work, the success will follow.
When it comes to social media, it’s hard to identify another person’s success. While 20k followers might look successful, if the influencer wants higher levels of engagement but are still only getting a couple of comments per post—they still haven’t achieved their version of success.
Things people usually look to achieve on social media:
Brand Awareness
Product Education
Lead Generation
Client Retention
Sales Boosting
Much More
Making sure you have a plan in place for your social media with clear goals in mind will keep you from wasting time online.
How to set social media goals in 3 steps
1. Conduct a social media audit
Before you can start thinking about what goals you want to accomplish with your social media, you need to have a clear picture of where you currently stand. That means you need to dig deep and establish what you are doing well and what needs improvement on your social media. In comes a social media audit.
Check out my last post on how to do a social media audit to get started.
2. Decide what you want your social media platforms to do
Now that you have a starting place, it’s time to decide what’s important to your business. What do you want to get from investing time in your social media accounts?
If you have some platforms that aren’t doing well at all, consider cutting them completely. If you’re focused on sales and you find that your current strategy isn’t bringing in the money, it’s time to focus on that. Want to educate people about your brand? Maybe it’s time for a campaign around that.
Once you decide what’s important, it’s easy to focus on what you should be investing in online.
3. Pick an overall end goal
Pick a goal related to what you want your social media platforms to do. It’s easy to say “I want to have a million followers” but pulling a goal out of thin air makes it very hard to build up a roadmap to achieving it.
Make sure your goals are trackable, achievable and will have an impact on your business. I recommend setting them up as SMART goals.
To set up a smart goal, you need to think about each of your goals and make sure to answer the following questions.
Is it S-Specific. Saying ‘I want more followers’ isn’t specific enough, so make sure to give it an amount and date. ‘I want 100 more followers in the next 30 days’ is a better goal.
Is it M-Measurable? Using the example above, having a date to achieve the goal means you can measure exactly how successful it was.
Is it A-Achievable? If you’re looking for 1million followers in 1 month, your goal is unrealistic. Make sure it is something you can achieve with the amount of time you have to invest in your business.
Is it related? Going back to your goals, is the goal your setting related to how you want your social media presence to serve your business?
Is it on a T-Timeline? Make sure you know when you want to achieve your goal by.
Time to get started
Once you have your goals in place, it’s time to get started on your social media strategy and content calendar. Need a little help? Send an email to kerra@kasocialmedia.ca to book your 1-on-1 consult to figure out what your next steps are to getting your social media working for your business.