How to Set Goals for Your Social Media

It’s common this time of year to begin turning your attention to goal-setting for the upcoming new year; but how does one set goals for their social media marketing?

As a small business owner, I find it helpful to set goals based on where I am now and where I’d like to be after a period of time. You have to know where you’re starting to know where you’re going, right? It certainly helps to narrow down where you’d like to focus your efforts to have the most impact on your business.

How to Set Goals for Your Social Media in 2021

With social media marketing, it’s helpful to do a proper audit of your current social media. Audits help you discover what’s helping and what’s hindering your progress on social. Once you audit your social, analyze your findings for new opportunities and potential new goals to take your marketing to the next level.

Auditing your own social media is not for the meek nor for the solo flyer! We recommend conducting your audit with a small, trusted group of colleagues and stakeholders. Their multiple perspectives will give you a clearer, more accurate picture of your current social presence. This blog post will walk you through that process to help inform your goal-setting for 2021.

How To Perform a Social Media Audit

1. Take inventory of all your current social media accounts. Make note of all login info, follower counts, who has admin access, etc. Next, record all of this info and all of the following audit info in a Google Doc or other shared file format with today’s date. As a result, you’ll have a document that will serve as your benchmark moving forward.
2. Website Check: does your home page feature “follow us on social” buttons or icons? Where are they located on your home page? Are they easily visible? Are the links to your social accounts correct? Do they open in a new tab?
3. Branding Check: do your social accounts “look” like your website? Does your profile picture, color palette, imagery, language, etc. uniformly reflect your brand visually? Are your social accounts visually consistent across platforms? If you use your logo for your profile picture, is it fully visible or easily readable or recognizable?
4. Content Check: what kind of formats are you posting? Examples: video, photos, text only, external links, Live video, Stories. How often are you posting?
5. Engagement Check: are people engaging with your content? How are they engaging: likes, comments, shares, saves? Are you engaging with your followers within your content? How often do your followers engage with your posts?
6. What are your top 3 marketing priorities? Are they reflected in your social content, your visual design, your blog posts? Are they easily obvious to your customer?
7. What are your current sources of content? If your product is very visual, do you have a lot of pictures or videos of your product? Do you blog regularly about your product or service? Have your customers posted about your service? Do they write reviews or testimonials about your business? Are you consistently growing a library of content?
8. What is your current advertising budget? Do you have one? What percentage of it is earmarked for social media advertising? What else do you spend your advertising dollars on? Calculate the average return on investment (ROI) for each advertising format.
9. Describe your current social media team. Who develops and plans your social media strategies? Which individuals or teams gather and create your content? Who schedules your posts? Which staffer is responsible for community engagement and follower growth? Who is responsible for your social media ads? Who supervises all of these roles? How often do you report to your managers and what does that look like? Who needs to be added to your team?

Analyze, then Set your Goals.

At this point in your audit, you will have amassed a good amount of data on the current state of your social media marketing. You will have had numerous discussions with your colleagues or team members to get to this point. Now it’s time to comb through this data haul and look at what it’s telling you.

Ask yourselves some direct questions.

• Where did you do well?
• What results were surprising or disappointing?
• Were there clear successes?
• What did you spend the most time on? What did you spend the least amount of time on?
• Did you experiment with new tactics? What were the results?

Now, get specific:

• What were your previous goals?
• Did you spend a lot of time writing blogs, but had no distribution plan to promote it?
• Did other priorities get in the way of growing your following or posting consistently?
• What kinds of content performed really well for you? What tanked?
• How did your advertising perform? Was your budget sufficient?
• What are your customers telling you?

Other questions will arise, no doubt. These are good ones to start with. Now think about the future. (Here’s where we get to goal-setting!)

• Do you anticipate a different playing field in the future? How will that affect your business?
• Are there larger business goals that will need to be reflected in your future social media marketing? Examples: new product launch, budget changes, service pivots, rebranding, website redesign.
• Are there opportunities for you to try something new with your social media tactics? Examples: experiment with new platform features (Reels? Live video?), test out new advertising audience targeting, new content threads or subject matter.
• What are your competitors doing? How can you learn from their social media?

From here, you need to select 2-3 priorities to work on in the future: your new social media GOALS. Articulate your new goals with specific language, a set timeline, and measurable results; or SMART goals. In a future blog post, we’ll cover how to reach those goals in a strategic, methodical manner.

Lather, Rinse, Repeat

If you think you’re done, I’ve got news for you. You’re actually just getting started! We recommend re-auditing your social media marketing periodically; maybe every 3-6 months. Use the results of this audit to benchmark your progress and analyze your efforts. Update your plans and reassess your goals. Lather, rinse, repeat to keep you and your team accountable.

To summarize, once you learn how to set goals for your social media, then it becomes easier the next time. Moreover, this exercise will also help you report to your managers and company leadership about your social media marketing efforts. Regular audits will give you specific, actionable data to set goals and inform all your future decision-making. And as a result, your social media marketing will improve over time. Isn’t that the point of goal-setting?

Want a pro’s outsider opinion to add to your audit? Need help on how to set your goals? Contact us to discuss!

Need other help with your social media marketing? We’re here to help. Talk to me.