What are social media goals?

A social media goal is a statement about what you want to achieve with a specific social marketing tactic or your whole social strategy. Good social media goals align with broader business objectives. Examples of common social media goals include generating leads, driving traffic to a website or online store, or getting more followers.

Social media goals can apply to anything from a single ad or organic post to a full-scale campaign.

Social media goals aren’t the same thing as your social media strategy. Instead, think of goals as components of the larger strategy.

Why do social media marketing goals matter?

Clear social media goals give you a target to aim for and can help you get buy-in from your manager or other stakeholders.

Well-made social media marketing goals will also help you:

• manage your budget,
• structure and streamline your workflow,
• prove your marketing’s return on investment,
• and align your social media activity with your organization’s broader business objectives.

6 examples of social media marketing goals

The social media goals you set should always reflect your specific business needs. But many goals can apply to almost any social media campaign. Some campaigns can even contribute to several goals at once.

Here are some examples of common social media goals and the metrics you can use to measure their success. These can help you frame your work in concrete, actionable terms.

1. Increase brand awareness

Building brand awareness means increasing the number of people who know your brand. This goal is best when launching a new product or breaking into a new market. 

Of course, expanding your audience never hurts. But brand awareness is usually the first step on the road to bigger things.

You can measure brand awareness on social media with specific metrics like

• Post reach: How many people have seen a post since it went live.
• Audience growth rate: The rate at which you gain followers over time.
• Potential reach: The number of people who might see a post during a reporting period.
• Social share of voice: How many people mention your brand on social media compared to your competitors.

Need help tracking brand awareness? Specialized social media management tools like Hootsuite can help.

Hootsuite Analytics makes measuring brand awareness metrics easier by allowing you to track metrics from multiple social networks, all in one place. You can even export the information or create custom reports to share with colleagues and stakeholders. The tool collects data from Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

2. Manage brand reputation

Social media marketing is one of the top tools you can use to build trust in your brand. These days, trust drives growth. This social media objective measures public attitudes about your brand.

The metrics for measuring reputation are like those for brand awareness. Of course, you’ll track brand mentions and relevant hashtags. But you’ll also want to watch what people say about you even when they don’t tag you.

Tools that measure social media sentiment, like Hootsuite Insights, can help you keep up with the conversation.

3. Improve community engagement

Engagement is any type of visible interaction with your brand on social media. For example, likes, comments and shares on your posts are all forms of engagement. 

Engagement is sometimes considered a vanity metric, but that’s not always true. These softer signals can help you track how well your content meets your target audience’s needs. Improving engagement means better quantity or quality interactions with your audience.

There are several ways to calculate social media engagement rates. Here are a few examples:

• Engagement rate by reach (ERR). The percentage of people who chose to interact with your content after seeing it. You can calculate this by individual post or average it over time.
• Engagement rate by posts (ER post). Similar to ERR, but measures the rate that your followers engage with your content.
• Daily engagement rate (Daily ER). How often your followers engage with your account on a daily basis. 

If calculations make your head spin, we’ve got you. Hootsuite’s free engagement calculator can do the work for you!

You can also use a social media analytics tool like Hootsuite to always have the most up-to-date engagement insights handy and easily build engagement reports to prove the effectiveness of your social strategy.

4. Deliver customer service

Your social presence isn’t just about attracting new customers. It’s also a place to keep the customers you already have. Goals to improve customer service on social media can take on a variety of forms, including:

• Establish a new customer support channel on social media
• Reduce wait times
• Increase customer satisfaction

Measuring the success of your social customer service will depend on your goal. Usually, you’ll use data from customer testimonials and customer satisfaction surveys. 

Internal measurements like the number of service requests handled per customer service representative can also be useful.

Conversational social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook are a good place to focus on your customer service goals.

If you don’t quite have the time or team capacity to answer every single question on social media, automate! A social media AI chatbot like Heyday will help you streamline your work and never leave a customer inquiry unattended, no matter the size of your team.

5. Gain market insights with social listening

If your top priority is finding out what you need to know, you might want to set a goal to improve your business’s social listening.

Social listening is a two-step process. First, track social media activity relevant to your brand. Then, analyze that information for insights about your company or industry.

The main metrics to track in social listening include

• Brand mentions. How many people are talking about your brand?
• Relevant hashtags. Are people participating in conversations relevant to your brand or industry?
• Competitor mentions. How often are people talking about your competitors (and what are they saying)?
• Industry trends. Is interest rising in your key products? Do you need to pivot to meet new demands?
• Social sentiment. What’s the general tone of the conversation on social?

Clear social listening goals can help you engage with your audience more effectively. They also help show the value of social marketing next time budgeting season rolls around.

6. Attract candidates for open positions

Using social media to fill open positions in your company is another kind of conversion. In this case, you’re targeting a particular type of user interaction: submitting a resume.

When recruiting for an open position, quality conversions are way more important than quantity. LinkedIn is usually (but not always!) your best bet for finding an engaged audience.

When tracking social recruitment, keep an eye on metrics like these:

• Number of leads per platform. Is Instagram sending more candidates than LinkedIn?
• Source of hire. Once a hiring decision has been made, review where the candidate came from. Maybe that flood of Instagram-generated leads was mostly spam.

 

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