Using social media as a marketing avenue is a powerful tool for most brands. And like all marketing tactics, it’s important to understand what success actually looks like online. You don’t want to just be producing content for the sake of putting something out there– you want it to have an impact on your business.

So, what impact is most important for you?

If you’re looking to get a better understanding of setting, analyzing and smashing your social media goals to improve your business performance, check out our recorded webinar below and read on.

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Step 1: Define Your “Why”

Let’s talk about why you are on social media in the first place. Some of these reasons may include to improve brand awareness,or  engage and interact with an audience that you have or want to have. Maybe it is to own the industry conversation and lead the share of voice, potentially to get leads and sales for your product or service, or to be responsive to customer needs and use social media as an extension of your customer service.
Really think about why you are on social media for your business, narrowing it down to the top 1-2 reasons. This is going to help you establish your goals.

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Step 2: Align Social KPIs with Marketing Goals

Before setting great social media goals, you need to know what your marketing goals are. It’s important to remember that social media is not going to be your one-size-fits-all solution to marketing. It is a part of a larger marketing plan that may include email, digital ads, prints, or any other advertising avenues. 

Where people fail on social media is trying to make it all things to all people, including all marketing efforts for you and your business. Take the time to be selective and intentional with which goal you decide social media will take on for you.

Once you’re clear in that direction, select the correlating social media KPI from this graphic to begin building your goals. 

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Step 3: Gather Your Metrics

One great part about social media for brands are the rich data and analytics you have access to on each platform. Each major social media platform offers businesses insights that give you detailed information all about your followers, reach and impressions, engagement on your posts, video views, and more information. 

Check out these instructions on how to access data on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest and Google Analytics. 

In order to gather your metrics, you will want to gather the KPIs from step 2 on each social media platform that your brand is active on. You will want to track measurements monthly, adding your monthly totals or averages to an analytic report– which brings us to our next step. 

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Step 4: Establish Benchmarks

Tracking your analytics helps you measure success and establish benchmarks. There are 3 ways to create benchmark goals for yourself — month-over-month, year-over-year, or by industry benchmarks (like this one all about Facebook ad benchmarks by industry, or this one about engagement and posting behaviors by social channel.)

Check out our free reporting template as a resource to help you get started. You will want to update your metrics monthly to track your growth and changes.

With all this data, you can now establish the right benchmarks based at any stage of your business. If your brand is less than a year online, focus on month-over-month and industry benchmarks to get started, aiming for fast growth with 20% plus growth month over month. This hyper-growth is assuming that you are starting at a smaller number, and therefore should be able to really emphasize on that quick rapid growth. 

If you have been online for 1 – 3 years, focus on year-over-year and industry benchmarks, with a 10% growth year-over-year. This gives you a quick, but steady growth. 

And if you are 3+ years online, you’re going to focus on year-over-year and industry benchmarks, but your growth percentage is likely going to be smaller, assuming that you already have higher numbers. Really focus on hitting that 1 – 5% growth year-over-year to maintain steady incoming traffic and results. 

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Step 5: Analyze Your Numbers

Numbers really don’t mean much without interpretation, so we want to make sure that we are asking and answering these questions: 

• What content performed best based on my goals? 

• What content performed worst? 

• What contributed to the increase or decrease in performance? 

• What content exceeded or didn’t exceed expectation?

There are so many facets to digging into your data, which we actually will have an entire webinar dedicated to dissecting and really understanding social media metrics. 

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Check out our upcoming episode “What Your Social Media Metrics Actually Mean” on Wednesday, 2/19/20 at 12PM CT.