Setting Your Social Media Goals For 2023

When I work with someone new, they always ask how they should get started with social media. One of the big things I always tell them is that you have to gain KNOW, LIKE, & TRUST. That is so important when it comes to social media, no matter the platform.

A while back, I heard someone say this when it came to getting started with social media….

Planning how to use social media to support your business is like creating the blueprint to your dream home.  It’s essential to design your dream home right.  When you design your dream home, it is designed to suite the occupants’ preferences and needs.

Similarly, you can think about your social networks the same way – there are people you want to attract and with whom you want to interact with.  That means you need custom designed and inviting places where they feel comfortable connecting with you online.

Each social network has its own culture, best practices and purpose.  Think of each social network you us as a different room in your dream home that you need to plan and design for its specific purpose.

What is the first thing every business owner should think about before starting with social media?

GOALS 🥅

You need a sense of direction – a clear vision of where you want to go and what you want to achieve from your social media. If you want your social media marketing efforts to have the biggest impact, it’s really important that they’re aligned with your overall business goals.

As you’re setting your social media goals it’s important to zoom out and look at the big picture: how can social media impact your whole business, rather than just your social media goals.

Some goals could be….

• Increase brand awareness – Things to measure include the number of followers you have, the reach of your social media posts each day/weekly/monthly, and how many mentions/shares do you get. You can track brand awareness through each platforms analytics or use third-party apps like Hootsuite or Buffer.

• Drive traffic to your website – You can measure how many visitors are coming from your social media channels, how much of your overall traffic does social media account for, what is the quality of the traffic from social media (bounce rate), and how well is the messaging of your social media posts (clicks on your social media posts). Google Analytics is one of the easiest tools for tracking web traffic.

• Generate new leads – This would include your sales funnel. You can collect people’s name and email address. Things to track include personal information through social media, downloads of your content, participation during contests or events, clicks on your lead-generation social media posts, and conversions of leads from social media. Google Analytics can help with tracking this information.

• Grow revenue – If you don’t have a long sales process, you can use social media to turn your audience into paying customers. You can measure how many sign ups or how much revenue is your social media channels bringing in as well as how much revenue is your social media advertising bringing in.

• Boost brand engagement – If you want people to see your social media posts, you have to produce engaging content and interact with your community. You can measure how many people are interacting with your social media posts (likes, comments & shares). You can also measure the mentions and replies to you. Track this through the social media platforms themselves or you can use social media analytics tools.

Some other goals could be:

• Build relationships with your customers
• Increase the size of your email list
• Increase sales to your products & services
• Research and learn more about your customers

When it comes to setting social media goals, you want to understand where you are and then see where you want to be. Your social media goals should align with your overall business goals.

You want to make sure you are setting S.M.A.R.T. 🧑🏼‍🎓 goals.

SPECIFIC

• Who’s responsible for achieving your goals? Do you have a team that you can assign goals to?
• What do you want to accomplish?
• What’s your why? What’s your goals purpose?
• Why each social media platform?

MEASURABLE – Goals that you can measure and track. It’s critical to measure your goals that way you know if you are moving towards achieving your goals or if you are moving away from them.

Things to measure include:

• traffic
• signups
• reach
• engagement
• audience growth

ACHIEVABLE – If you set them too high, you’ll probably set yourself up for failure and you’ll end up getting frustrated. If you set them too low, you won’t be challenged.

RELEVANT – Your social media goals should support your business’s overall marketing goals. You want to have a path that will lead you to success.

TIMED – Give yourself a deadline. You can set weekly, monthly or even quarterly goals.

Here’s an example of a SMART Goal….

I want to reach 400K total YouTube channel views by the end of the year. I will measure the views. To see if this goal is attainable, I will look at my current numbers. One of my overall business goals is to create more video content, so this goal is relevant. And, this goal is time sensitive because I set a deadline of the end of the year.

In Conclusion….

If you don’t meet your goal by your deadline, don’t get down on yourself and give up. Take a minute to assess why you didn’t meet your goal, and then start over. Maybe you have to break that goal down into smaller goals that way you won’t run into any obstacles. You might have more success then 🥳!

Now it’s your turn….

What are your social media goals? Do you keep track of your goals? Comment below.