6 Tips to Setting Goals for Your Social Media Campaign

Do you have difficulty setting social media marketing campaign goals for yourself? Or worse still are you the type that tends to set totally unrealistic targets? Either way, the importance of having a strategy in place for setting social media marketing campaign goals cannot be denied. With a good social media, strategy, you will be able to set reasonably achievable goals, meet them, and measure whether or not they work.

Here are some notes on planning your social media strategy.

1. Being Specific Leads to Success on Social Media

Start by setting specific goals. More often than not, brands tend to make the mistake of being too generic when setting social media marketing goals. If the plan is simply to grow your followership or fan base, then you can say you’ve hit your target once you have a single follower. It’ll be easier to know what needs to be accomplished once you’re more specific about your goals.  Along with being specific, it's also important for you to be clear about what it is that you wish to accomplish. Don’t be ambiguous. If your goals are not clear and specific, you’ll find it difficult to measure your activities and its level of success or failure.

2. Are Your Goals Realistic and Achievable?

Once you know what you need to accomplish, the next thing to do is set up a system that you can use to monitor your progress and determine if you have reached your goal.

You need to know whether your goal is realistic and achievable.  Having a million fans or followers is great but the question is whether it’s realistically feasible. Setting unrealistic goals will likely lead you to failure and disappointment. Make a point of establishing goals that you can realistically meet, say for instance: to grow your fan or follower base by 15%.

3. Have Clear Timelines: They Keep You Accountable

Make sure you provide yourself with a deadline for meeting your goal. If for instance, your goal is to increase you fan base by 15%, then set a clear timeline within which to meet that target.

Bear in mind that the markers you set when establishing goals for your social media marketing varies you’re your organization’s mission and as the influence and recognition of your brand grows, your goals will also change.

4. Split Your Social Media Goals into Categories

It is useful to break your goals into categories. CMS Wire recommends breaking social media marketing goals into four categories:

·         Audience-building goals

·         Activity-based goals

·         ROI (return-on-investment) goals

·         Engagement goals

The social media marketing goals that you establish will also vary depending on the social media platform you choose to use. Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest are all quite different. In setting goals for Twitter, you might focus on things increasing engagement rate, tweet frequency, retweets, follower growth, etc. Facebook goals, by comparison, might look more like this: to increase engagement, reach, or Page likes. Since brands don't have profiles on Pinterest as they do on Facebook or Twitter, your goals on this type of social media marketing platform will naturally be much different.

5. Past Statistics Can Prove Useful

If you find that you're experiencing difficulty in determining which types of goals you should set, try pulling up some of your past analytics to find out what you had done before. Breaking down your stats in terms of average monthly traffic or the percentage of traffic will give you an idea of where best to start.

6. It’s Not Always A Pass or Fail

It’s not just about knowing whether you met an objective or not. The whole idea of setting goals for your marketing on social media is continuous improvement. It’s easy to feel that because you didn’t meet a specific social media marketing goal, you’ve failed, and that will make you feel discouraged. Instead of seeing it as a failure, take some time to review and analyze for future improvement. For instance, consider what you could have done differently and what possible alternative could work better. More importantly, try not to focus too much on what didn’t work but look at what actually did.

Regardless of how many goals and the various types of goals that you set in your plan, it's important to always look at the big picture. At the end of the day, keep in mind that your social media marketing campaign isn't just about attracting more followers or fans, or even increasing your number of shares or tweets. Instead, it’s about creating a conversation around your brand that will resonate with your target audience.