How to Set Social Media Marketing Goals

The beginning of a new year presents the perfect opportunity to reassess your marketing and to set new goals. Unfortunately, when it comes to social media marketing, a lot of people seem to be flying by the seat of their pants. Many companies create profiles on sites like Facebook and Twitter and do a little blogging, hoping for great results, but the problem is that they have no goals and no strategy. They’re simply throwing a bunch of junk at the wall and seeing what sticks.

You’ll never get quality results from your social media marketing if you don’t have true goals to guide your campaign and your efforts. So, how can you set realistic goals for your social media marketing in 2015?

Here are some tips to help you out:

Graphic courtesy of Tailwind.

• Know what you want to get from social media—This is something you really should know before you even get active with social media in the first place, but if you’re already active, that’s okay. Let’s take a step back and figure out what exactly you want to get from all your hard work. Are you wanting to increase brand awareness? Increase website traffic? Change people’s opinion of your brand? Increase customer loyalty? Improve customer satisfaction ratings? Make more sales?
• Make sure your goals are measurable—Any social media marketing goal you set should be something that you can measure. Don’t be vague; be as specific as you possibly can. Don’t just say you want to get more website visitors, say that you want to increase website traffic by 25%, for example. Don’t just say that you want to increase customer loyalty, define how much you want to improve customer loyalty by. And give yourself deadlines for achieving your goals.
• Set milestones to track your progress—Let’s say your goal is to increase your website traffic by 25% over 2014. Rather than waiting until the end of the year to see if you’ve achieved this, you need to set milestones that allow you to easily track your progress along the way. This way, you can see if you’re on track to achieve your goals, and if not, you can make adjustments to your strategy.
• Identify challenges—You will always have hurdles to overcome if you want to reach your goals. If there aren’t any challenges, your goals aren’t ambitious enough. The key is to identify these challenges early on so you can plan ways to overcome them. Be prepared for your challenges so they don’t derail your social media marketing efforts.
• Monitor your results closely—With clear goals and deadlines, the only thing left to do is to put in the work and to track your progress along the way. As you monitor the results of your social media marketing efforts, if you find you aren’t getting the kind of progress you hoped for, you need to either adjust your strategy or reassess whether your goals are actually realistic.

So, what are some of your social media marketing goals for 2015?