Did you know that the average user spends 28% of their Internet time on social media? Social media is an excellent place for you to reach people who want to engage with your business and get to know your company better.

When you launch a social media strategy, though, you need to set social media goals. Social media objectives help you stay focused and ensure that you’re driving the right results with your campaign.

So, what goals can you set?

Keep reading to learn six social media goals you can set, plus metrics you’ll track to see if you’re reaching those goals!

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1. Build brand awareness

One of the most common social media goals is to build brand awareness.

Social media is a great place to build brand awareness because many people spend their time scrolling through their feed and looking at posts. It means that if someone follows your business on social media, they can get exposed to your brand as they scroll through their feed.

Brand awareness is a great goal to set because it’s a fundamental part of earning conversions. People need to know who you are and what you do before purchasing your products or using your services.

Brand awareness is one of the best social media objectives if you’re looking to:

• Help people discover your business or brand for the first time
• Help new people get familiar with your company
• Help people understand your company values, what you offer, and how you can help them

Key metrics to track brand awareness

If you decide that building brand awareness is the best social media goal for you, here are some key metrics you’ll want to track to ensure you’re reaching your goals:

• Brand mentions: Brand mentions are a great metric to track to see if you’re reaching your goals. You can use a tool like Hootsuite to see who’s talking about your brand, products, or services. It’s a great way to see what people say about your brand.
• Shares: Shares are another metric to track for brand awareness. If people are sharing your brand with others, not only does it indicate they’re getting familiar with your company, but also helping others get to know your brand too.
• Post reach: Another great metric for monitoring your brand awareness is looking at post reach. Post reach indicates how many people saw a specific content post from your page. This metric is great to help you see how many people get exposed to your brand.
• Impressions: Impressions indicate how many times your content is displayed, regardless of whether it was clicked or not. This metric can help you understand how many people see your content and how often.

2. Increase conversions or sales

Another prevalent goal is to increase conversions. Every business aims to get more conversions and grow. The type of conversions varies, though.

Some common forms of conversions include:

• Buying products
• Investing in services
• Completing a form submission
• Signing up for an event

Social media platforms are an excellent place for you to encourage people to convert. You can deliver tailored information that shows them why your business is the best option for your company.

Key metrics to track conversions

Tracking conversions is one of the best social media goals for your business.

If you want to track this metric effectively, here are a few key metrics to track:

• Conversion rate: Your conversion rate tracks how many people complete your desired conversion action compared to the total number of visitors. This metric helps you see how many people are converting through your social profiles.
• Click-through rate (CTR): CTR is a great metric to track to see if your ads draw people’s interests and get them to engage. You can track this metric to find ways to improve your ad targeting, ad copy, and ad offer to get more of your target market to click on your ad.
• Bounce rate: Bounce rate indicates how many people visit a page and leave the page before taking another action. This metric is critical because it can show why your conversions aren’t as high as you’d like.

3. Manage brand reputation

Next on our list of social media marketing goals is managing brand reputation. It may seem like this goal is similar to building brand awareness, but it’s slightly different. With managing brand reputation, you focus on analyzing and monitoring whether people say positive or negative things about your business.

With brand awareness, you’re focusing on helping as many people as possible to discover your brand. On the other hand, brand reputation management focuses on handling what people say about your brand and how they portray your brand on the web.

Think of managing your brand as the second goal to brand awareness. Once people are aware of your brand, you must monitor what they’re saying about you.

Building a positive brand reputation is a goal many businesses set.

If you think about companies with a more significant following, like Target or Walmart, they spend a lot of time managing their brand. They’re already trusted, but they must consistently manage their brand reputation to maintain a positive image.

Key metrics to track with managing brand reputation

If you want to focus on managing brand reputation as part of your campaign, here are a few key metrics you can track:

• Customer satisfaction score: Your customer satisfaction score comes from putting surveys in front of your audience and monitoring their responses. Generally, these surveys ask a simple question like “How would you rate your experience with [product/service/company]?” and have responses like “satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory.”
• Social sentiment: Social sentiment involves measuring social mentions to understand how people feel about your business. They may have positive sentiment, meaning they’re happy or enthusiastic, or negative sentiment, meaning they’re angry or frustrated with your business.
• Social share: Social share focuses on how your brand performs in the market compared to your competition. This measurement enables you to see how much you dominate the industry on social compared to other businesses.
• Net promoter score (NPS): NPS is a rating of your business, on a scale of 1-10, of how likely people are to recommend your company, products, or services to others. You want to have a score of nine or ten. Anything below six needs improvement.

 

4. Build engagement with community

Next on our list of social media objectives is building engagement. Many companies will choose to focus on building engagement in hopes of nurturing leads towards conversion.

When you focus on building engagement, you encourage people to chat with your business. You have conversations with them and help them get to know your company better. Additionally, you can answer their questions and provide them with helpful information.

Key metrics to track with building engagement with your community

Want to know what metrics to track to ensure you’re building engagement?

Here are a few key metrics to monitor with building engagement:

• Comments, likes, shares: These metrics are all indicative of how people engage with your business. Comments, likes, and shares can help you better understand how people interact with your business through social media.
• Engagement rate: Your engagement rate is the total number of engagements on a post divided by the total number of impressions on a post. This metric helps you see how many people opt to engage with your content when they see it.
• CTR: Your CTR is another great metric to monitor to see how people engage with your business. This metric helps you understand how many people click on links in your posts and visit different pages on your site.
• Hashtag tracking: If you have hashtags that you use for your campaigns, you can track them to see how many people post using the hashtags and what they’re posting about your business.

 

5. Deliver great customer service

Are you aiming to make your customers happy? If so, you may opt to use delivering great customer service as one of your social media goals. This goal focuses on delivering a positive user experience for your audience.

When you focus on customer service, you focus on answering your audience’s questions and troubleshooting any problems. People often turn to social media to air out their complaints, so it’s an excellent place for you to do customer service.

 

Focusing on customer service is one of the best social media marketing goals if you’re looking to help customers have a positive experience with your business continuously.

Key metrics to track with customer service

Here are some customer service metrics you’ll want to monitor:

• Customer satisfaction score: Again, customer satisfaction score shows you how happy customers are with your business. You can track responses to these surveys to see if you’re offering satisfactory customer service for your customers.
• Number of service requests completed: With this metric, you’ll track how many service requests your team obtains compared to how many they complete. You can track requests you’ve received, how long it took to resolve them, and if they were resolved.
• Response time: With response time, you track how quickly your customer service team responds to people’s questions and queries. If you don’t use chatbots, you may find your response time is much slower. You can track this metric to see how you can improve.

6. Obtain qualified leads

Last on our list of social media campaign goals is to obtain qualified leads. Many businesses focus on earning new leads that can then turn into sales for their company.

Social media is a great place to obtain leads for your business. You help people get to know your business and nurture them towards becoming a lead.

So, how do you know when somebody has become a lead?

Generally, someone becomes a lead when they submit information to your business. So, for example, if someone signs up for your email list, they’re a lead. Or, if someone inputs their information to download a guide, that’s also a lead.

 

Key metrics to track with lead generation

If you’re using lead generation as your social media objective, here are a few metrics you’ll want to track:

• Form submissions: If you’re inviting people to fill out a form on your social media profile, you can track the form submissions to see how many people submit their information. It’s a great way to track leads for your business.
• Content downloads: If you share a link to downloadable content on your social profile, you can track and see who submits their information to download the content. It helps you see if your social media posts are generating leads.
• Clicks on lead generation posts: If you make lead-generation specific posts, you can track their performance to see how many leads you obtain with your post. You can use a tool like Google Analytics to see how much of your traffic comes from social media.

 

 

 

Set your social media goals today

Now that you know the different types of social media goals for businesses, you can decide which goals fit your needs best. If you’re feeling stuck, though, you can rely on the experts at WebFX to help.

We know how to help companies set the right goals and achieve them. In the past five years alone, we’ve driven over $2.4 billion in sales and over 6.3 million leads for our clients.

If you want to have a team of over 250 social media experts help you set and achieve your goals, contact us online or call us today at 888-601-5359 to speak with a strategist about our social media services!