How to Set SMART Social Media Goals

Why SMART Goals Are Crucial for Social Media Marketing Success with Examples

Social media marketing is a powerful tool in the modern market. It allows your company to connect with its customers on a personal level and build relationships with them. 

However, to be successful you can’t simply post to your social media accounts like Facebook and LinkedIn and hope for the best. You must have a strategy, with smart objectives for social media outcomes. And when we say smart, we really mean SMART.

SMART goals for social media marketing are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. It’s a positive, assertive attitude to goal setting – and attitude changes everything.

SMART objectives for social media campaign goals will ensure that you are reaching your target audience in the most efficient way possible. They also allow you to measure the success of a campaign and adjust accordingly for future campaigns.

Without further ado, let’s dig into how to set social media goals and reach them.

What social media goals do you want to set?

Social media is a powerful tool. According to the latest social media statistics:

• Almost 6 in 10 people worldwide use social media ─ that’s more than 4.5 billion potential customers

• 82% of the population in North America use social media

• On average, people will spend almost 2½ hours surfing their social media each day

• The biggest social media network is Facebook, primarily used for messaging friends and family, sharing content, and keeping up to date with news

• LinkedIn is used mostly for keeping up to date with news, finding information about brands and products, and sharing content

The potential of social media as a vehicle to propel your business toward its goals is huge. It all starts with determining what your social media goals are. 

SMART goals for social media strategy planning commonly revolve around:

• Driving traffic to your website

• Selling a product/advertising a service

• Generating more sales and leads

• Communicating with customers

• Increasing brand awareness

• Running an awareness campaign

• Establishing online authority

But these aren’t really goals, are they? They’re too fluffy to be goals. 

How to set social media goals the SMART way

The success of any social media campaign is first established by a foundation of SMART goals. Without credible objectives, how will you know which road to follow? How will you know when you have reached your destination?

It’s crucial to know what success looks like before you plan to achieve it. Here is how to set goals for social media campaigns in three steps.

Step #1: Identify your overall objective with social media

Your business has social media accounts, but why? Do you use them? Why? What content do you post? Why?

Social media is a business tool, and savvy companies use it to their advantage. To do the same, you must identify your overall business objectives for your social media presence. Answer the following questions as a start point:

• Why are you on social media?

• Are you trying to gain a larger presence in your community? 

• Do you wish to develop brand awareness and generate leads?

• Are you trying to build customer loyalty?

When we partner with clients to build out their social media, we explore these questions and many more ─ it’s crucial to really understand your social media objectives before moving to the second step.

Step #2: Determine the status of your current social media performance

You cannot plot a course for success if you don’t know where you are setting out from.

Social media is a terrific way to connect with your audience. But it can also be a major source of traffic and leads for your business. But how do you know if you are getting the most out of social media?

This is where social media analytics come in. By using these tools, businesses can better understand their performance on various platforms and their reach across the general population. 

You need insight into your followers, engagement rates, demographics, the geography of followers, etc. This knowledge will help you to decide what content you should produce, what time and where you should publish, and even what social media goals to set.

Step #3: Set SMART goals for social media

Now you can lay out your destination and chart your course to success with social media, by setting SMART goals:

S = Specific

Set a specific goal. Put a number on it!

M = Measurable

Be sure that you can measure your progress, and that the performance metric relates to the goal.

A = Attainable

Do you have the resources to attain the goal? The expertise you need, the budget to achieve it, and the time to produce the content, for example?

R = Realistic and Relevant

Check that your goals are realistic. Check that they are relevant to your business goals. Make sure they will make a significant difference when you achieve them.

T = Time-bound

If you don’t put a deadline on a goal, you won’t achieve it, because those goals will fall down the pecking order in your urgent list.

(Tip: Break down big goals into smaller milestones goals ─ this will help to keep you motivated and moving forward.)

Examples of SMART goals for social media success

 The goals you set for your business’s social media campaign will, of course, be specific to you. However, to get you started on thinking about the types of goals you might wish to set, here are a few examples that our clients have set for themselves:

To build brand awareness

• Double the number of your followers on Twitter within the next three months

• Double the number of times you post on all social media channels for the remainder of the year

To generate more leads

• Increase the number of newsletter sign-ups by 15% by the end of the year

• Improve your Instagram conversion rate by 10% before February

To increase community engagement

• Reach a minimum of 30 comments on each Facebook post within three months

• Double the number of social shares on all social media channels within 12 months

To grow your audience

• Double the number of Twitter brand mentions for the next quarter

• Reach 200 social shares per blog post in six months

To drive more website traffic

• Grow social media traffic share by 20% this year

• Improve your Facebook post click-through rates by 10% in twelve months

What SMART social media goals would you set for your business?

When you have set these objectives, what next?

To learn how we help our clients to set their goals and then develop the strategy to achieve them, with the tools they need to do so, click here to book a live demo of BlabberJax in action.

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