Which goals should your business set for your social media?

Looking for a new direction for your social media?

We’re gearing up for a new financial year, looking at our priorities, and deciding on our goals for 2020/21.

So, it’s time to think about how your social media fits into the big picture.

What are the main metrics to consider?

Followers – Measures the number of followers of your feed or page.

Having a substantial number of followers can be an excellent thing for a business. However, if thousands of your followers are inactive or unengaged, your business won’t reap the benefits.

Impressions – The number of time your content is displayed, whether someone interacted with it or not. This can include the same person seeing your content more than once.

Reach – Measures the total number of unique people who see your piece of content.

Engagement – Measures how people interact with your posts. This includes sharing, liking, and commenting on them.

How do you decide on your social media goals?

Your goals need to reflect the general goals you’ve set for your business.

That could include:

• Business growth – Increasing turnover, staff numbers, or the number of clients/customers.
• Profits growth – Improving profit margins, driving down costs, improving sales.
• Brand awareness – Creating buzz, improving brand recognition, aligning the brand with certain values or aims.

Your social media operation needs to back up these goals closely and work to support them.

So, for creating more buzz and brand awareness, you may decide that increasing reach is the most important metric.

For increasing sales, your main goal could well be to improve engagement and drive more people to your website.

Where do you start?

Get an accurate picture of the current situation by looking at your social media platform analysis and comparing it with the Google Analytics for your website.

Platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter will give you a detailed breakdown of how your posts are performing, what sort of content is the most engaging to your followers, and what times of day are the most effective to post.

Social media agencies like Social Media Hub will provide you with a detailed report of your social media activity and will highlight areas where improvements can be made.

They may suggest using different versions of the same post to test the best time to post and the best sort of content to create engagement – A/B testing.

Once you have a clear idea of where things stand, look at setting some realistic goals and giving them a time frame.

For example, you could decide to increase the number of your Facebook page followers by 100 in three months or improve the reach of your posts by 25% in six months.

Should your posts be organic or paid-for advertising?

Most businesses opt for a mixture of organic and paid-for advertising.

Organic posts which share interesting content tend to rank higher in feeds on platforms like Facebook because the algorithm is looking for this type of content.

However, there are also some advantages for paid-for advertising, with the ability to target your ideal audience exactly.

Your goals form the basis of your social media plan

Once you’ve set those goals, you’ll have a good idea of what sort of content will help you achieve them, when you need to create and post it, and how often you need to measure your results.

Then, you can create a detailed social media plan for the months ahead.

Need help creating your social media goals? Call us on 01443 571375 or get in touch here.