How to Set Social Media Marketing Goals (Step by Step)

No lie. The most popular post in Instagram history is this picture of an egg. The most popular video on YouTube is Baby Shark. Doo doo doo doo doo doo. Baby shark doo doo doo doo. You get it? You get the, get the idea. And the most retweeted tweet in the English language was written by a 60 year old from Reno, Nevada, Nevada, who gathered almost 3.5 million retweets trying to score some free chicken nuggets from Wendy's. So, yeah, clearly anything's possible on these platforms. What's up? It's Jamal from HubSpot. This video will help you identify what goals you should be aiming for with social media and then teach you a bit about the metrics used to track these goals. If you find this useful, be sure to like this video and subscribe to the HubSpot YouTube channel. When it comes to online marketing, everybody's trying to break the Internet and it's easy to understand why. Social media has made it possible to instantly communicate with many millions of people with a tap of a smartphone. But with 6,000 tweets being sent out per second, 4 million Instagram posts going out every hour, and more than 40 million minutes of video being uploaded every day to YouTube, standing out on social media is a huge challenge. Going viral is not an effective online marketing strategy, but that won't stop me from trying. A recent survey of how businesses use social media shows that most companies focus on things like brand awareness, brand reputation, community engagement, and market insights. These are commonly called soft marketing targets, which are important but difficult to quantify when allocating resources. In the middle of the list, you find things like increased conversions and nurture leads. These are hard market goals, which are easier to evaluate because they have direct correlation to your bottom line. So why aren't more businesses focusing on hard marketing goals on social media? Seriously, why? What's wrong with you guys? I'm going to let you in on a little secret. Social media platforms are not optimized for your business goals. They're optimized for their business goals, which is to keep people on the platform. But you can still hack your way to serious growth using social media if you know how. The first thing you want to master is knowing what metrics have actual value and which ones are vanity metrics. For example, height of my hair versus how cool the jacket is. One of those is very important. Let me know in the comments. Vanity metrics are big numbers that look impressive but have little to do with achieving concrete business goals. Learning to identify and avoid vanity metrics will Save you from spending time and resources chasing numbers that don't actually contribute to your success. To do that, let's start by breaking down social media metrics into four categories. The first is reach. As the name implies, reach is how many people are aware of your brand and messaging on social media. It can be broken down into how many followers you have, how many people see your content in their newsfeed, otherwise known as impressions, how many people are talking about your brand on social media and share a voice, which means how these numbers compare to your direct competitors. Think of this as how big a piece of the pie you're getting. And if you're anything like me, you want the whole thing. Just one big bite, all at once. Pie isn't everything. Write down your gullet. The next set of social media metrics is called engagement. Engagement means that people are not just aware of your content on social media, but are interacting with it. They can do that by liking your content, commenting on your posts, sharing your content, and leaving ratings and reviews. These metrics indicate that people are engaged with your content enough to respond to it, hopefully in a positive manner. Not like the comments I've been getting recently. And because social media algorithms love engagement, accumulating lots of likes, comments and shares will contribute to more overall reach, which will in turn increase your engagement. You might have noticed that we've now covered all of the most common social media metrics. There are also the numbers that platforms care about because they keep people on their platform, which is how they make money. The question is, are these numbers helping you make money? For most businesses, the answer is unfortunately, no. Yes, you do need followers and reach and engagement to succeed on social media. But chasing these numbers alone. Kind of like chasing the ice cream truck. When you hear the nice little ice cream truck jingle and you're pretty sure that he saw you, but he kept going anyway. So now you're chasing after him and you're spending the entire afternoon running from town to town trying to get your favorite Choco switch swirl. Yeah, doing that isn't a good idea. And for your business as well, that won't affect your your bottom line. You need to dig deeper to gauge success. Which brings us to the next category of metrics. Roi. ROI stands for return on investment. What kind of return are you getting from investing resources into social media? Is your social media leading to direct sales? This can be on your own website, a third party store, or increasingly on an E commerce platform powered by the social media companies themselves. If you're not getting direct sales, is your social media activity, resulting in weak conversions like signups and downloads that you can convert into paying customers. Down the road. At the very least is social media leading to inbound links where people are coming to your website. You might notice that tracking these metrics require more than just the data you receive from the social media platforms. You need to make sure your own web portals are set up to track the stages of the sales process after users make the jump from social media. Only then can you properly analyze if the revenue you're bringing in from social media is greater than what you're spending on social media. Makes sense. Of course, you can also improve your bottom line by saving money, and social media has proven very effective in that regard, especially when it comes to the fourth and final metric, customer service. How much money can you actually save? Well, a customer service interaction on social media costs about $1. That's compared to about $4 per email interaction and $6 for every call to customer service. With savings like that, it's easy to see why people want to monitor social media for customer service issues and you get yourself a nice gum. Stick of gum $6 gets you a stick of gum. These days the economy is doing good. To make sure you're doing it effectively, be sure to track the following metrics. What issues were resolved via social media? What was the response time to initially address the issue, and how long did it take for the issue to be resolved? Did whoever you help send you a nice little meme afterwards as thanks? That's very important and you should keep track of that. With all these metrics to consider, from reach and engagement to ROIs and customer service, you might be asking yourself how to make the best data driven decisions for your company. So let's talk about setting goals that will turn your social media metrics into actionable items. Start by considering which of the following metrics that we discuss will help you best achieve your overall business goal. Now you might be thinking these can all help. But to avoid the analysis paralysis that comes with too much data, it's probably wise to start with just one or two clear objectives. Once you determine which strategic objectives you want to achieve, you can solidify them into clear goals by applying the popular SMART Goals framework. SMART stands for specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and timely Specific means knowing exactly what metric you want to address and how much you want it to improve. Measurable means being able to quantify the improvement with exact numbers. Just be sure that the metric you're tracking is accurately representing your goal. Achievable means setting goals that your team can be reasonably expected to meet. Set goals that are ambitious but not ridiculous because that's not what the R stands for. Relevant goes back to what we talked about in terms of vanity metrics versus Useful ones. Wanting to increase followers or the height of your hair by 20% is a perfectly fine goal to set as long as it's directly tied to something that actually affects your business. And timely means setting an exact time period during which you want to achieve the goal you set. Because of the real time nature of social media, it can be tempting to check your metrics too often. Give your team enough time to execute their social media strategy without obsessively following every post performance. If you want to learn more about using the Smart Goals framework for all your business goal setting, check out the link in the description. Now I'm not saying you'd be smart to check out the link in the description, but you would be pretty smart. Please laugh. By pursuing the right goals on social media, then tracking your efforts using the right metrics, you'll soon see results that your business can bank on. And yeah, hopefully people send you memes and stuff. Good luck. I feel like these are the things that I noticed that no one else notices. My hair is a little lumpy. Did anyone notice? Probably not. Do I care a little too much?