Setting reasonable goals, followed by reporting, tracking, analyzing, and benchmarking, is the first step in defining success in social media engagement. However, not all outcomes from social media should or can be evaluated in monetary terms. Qualitative results such as increased awareness, sentiment, and reach are just as valid. For that reason, every organization must select the relevant KPIs that will help it attain its targets.
So, whether you are looking to develop and define goals for your Instagram growth or any other social media platform in a tangible, relevant, and meaningful way for your company, we offer some practical recommendations that we believe can help you set social media goals. After all, when you’re taking steps towards stable social media growth, you have to define the goals you want to achieve to have a clearer view of where you’re going with your social media efforts.
Focus on Boosting the Number of People That Visit Your Website
Driving visitors to your blog or website, who may turn into customers, is a step beyond establishing a digital presence for your brand. In that context, three out of every five marketers use social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram to promote their products and drive traffic to their websites.
To measure your efforts, Google Analytics is one of the most straightforward tools for monitoring site traffic as it provides data on the traffic to your website or blog from a variety of sources, including social media API. The number of visits from each channel, the percentage of bounce rate, the overall traffic, and more are all displayed in this view.
So, in that sense, make boosting the number of people that visit your website your primary social media goal and use measuring tools like Google Analytics to assess your efforts so that you can know if you should modify something in your marketing strategies.
Increasing Brand Recognition
Brand recognition is yet another of the top reasons marketers use social media, and it’s simple to see why: the average individual spends about two hours every day on social media, making it among the most efficient methods for capturing customers’ attention.
Thanks to social media, marketers can now have a more precise grasp of their brand’s online presence and reach. Most social media networks like Instagram now include data on the reach of your content, enabling you to report your online presence.
However, while most social media platforms have built-in statistics, third-party management solutions for monitoring and tracing brand awareness make analyzing this data even more accessible. You can, for example, use third-party apps to track your following growth, reach across several platforms, and get to know where your brand recognition efforts are standing at.
Optimizing Lead Generation
Companies with a lengthy sales cycle, such as business software companies, usually use lead generation to the fullest. This route is your sales funnel; therefore, social media may be a fantastic strategy for getting individuals to the top of your funnel because of the enormous number of people you can approach or acquaint them with your company.
The term “lead” has a broad definition, but it usually refers to someone who has provided your firm with personal information such as their email address, name, or anything similar. There are a variety of metrics to track to quantify your social media leads, and the following list includes a few of the most frequent indicators to track:
- Personal data, typically email addresses collected from social media;
- Participation;
- Gated content downloads;
- Number of people who have clicked on your social media posts for lead generation;
- Conversions of social media leads.
Boosting User Engagement
One of the most critical reasons marketers use social media is to increase user engagement with their brand. In that manner, social media interactions have been shown to boost loyalty, brand perception, and word-of-mouth referrals.
Additionally, social media platforms’ algorithms, such as Facebook’s and Instagram’s, are promoting posts with higher engagement on their feeds on the premise that users will be more intrigued in seeing highly engaging content.
In other words, you must respond to your community and provide engaging content if you want visitors to see your social media postings. For that reason, set user engagement as one of your top social media goals, tirelessly work to increase the rates, and measure your efforts to know how you’re doing. Metrics that could be used to gauge engagement include:
- The number of people that like, share, and comment on your posts;
- The number of people that mention your brand on their profiles.
Nonetheless, you can manually track engagement numbers through the social media networks themselves, or you can utilize a social media analytics application to assist you.
Operating Functional Social Customer Service Is Essential
Customer care on social media will help businesses enhance revenue, retention, and customer happiness. However, according to studies, barely one in five respondents, or only 21% of customers stated they use social media for customer service.
The trend of individuals using social media for customer service is likely to continue, and it’s believed that businesses may still differentiate themselves from their competitors by providing excellent social media customer service.
You can manually track the number of support inquiries and your response time if you have a small volume of customer service inquiries on your social media channels. On the other hand, you can also use a social media customer support tool, for more efficiency.
Final Thoughts
Social media is difficult to understand at first, and that’s when it seems the most daunting. But once you start to master the basics, you realize its potential. There are thousands upon thousands of social media sites out there, so the possibilities are virtually endless. Know your purpose going in, and be clear about what you want to get out of a platform before you start sharing.