What Are Social Media Goals

A proper social media strategy

always starts with setting goals for your content and accounts. Setting goals for your social media will guide the content you create and post, the engagement tactics you use, and the types of optimizations you need to make to reach your target demographic. Before you set social media goals, an excellent place to start is to understand the different types of achievable goals within the framework of this digital marketing medium.

Social Media Awareness Goals

The most common social media goal is to increase awareness for your brand within your target demographic. Awareness is measured through reach and impressions. If you’re familiar with the marketing rule of seven, you’ll know that it takes seven interactions with a brand before purchase. Here are some common social media awareness goals to track:

  1. Increase the impressions within your existing followers.
  2. Increase the reach within your target demographic.
  3. Increase the reach within your local community.
  4. Increase the impressions of people who know about your brand but don’t yet follow your account.

Social Media Engagement Goals

Social media awareness and discovery goals are at the top of the social media marketing funnel, followed by engagement metrics and goals. Engagements are the data points that speak to the algorithms within each platform to indicate whether or not social media users find your content valuable or interesting. Algorithms reward content and accounts that have high engagement rates with more visibility within their existing communities and target demographics. Remember, social media companies want users to stay on the platforms for as long as possible. After all, human attention is the commodity they sell to advertisers. So, if you want your content to reach and impress upon more people, you need to focus on increasing engagements. Here are some common engagement goals:

  1. Increase likes
  2. Increase comments
  3. Increase shares
  4. Increase saves
  5. Increase video views 
  6. Increase taps/clicks

Social Media Growth Goals

The number of followers your account has isn’t the most important goal to focus on, but it’s easy to benchmark. We refer to a follower account as a vanity metric if it’s the only one a brand is focusing on. Healthy follower growth results from highly engaging content that social media users enjoy consuming. Here are some common social media growth goals:

  1. Grow the awareness and engagements within your existing community.
  2. Attract users within your target demographic to follow your accounts.

Social Media Conversion Goals

If awareness and discovery are at the top of the social media marketing funnel, conversions are at the bottom. The holy grail of social media goals is conversion. After the point of conversion, the purchase intent or decision happens. Here are some common social media conversion goals:

  1. Drive traffic to your website
  2. Increase emails and direct messages
  3. Generate and nurture leads
  4. Increase sales
  5. Increase email subscriptions 
  6. Increase downloads

We’ve kept the social media goals outlined above quite general to accommodate the different types of businesses and industries that use social media in their digital marketing efforts. When it comes to your specific business, it’s important to choose goals that make sense for your business. Even more important is to make the goals specific to your target demographic. 

Are you wondering what types of goals you should set for your brands’ social media? Read our guide on how to set social media goals.

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