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Why you need to define your social media goals

By Suzanne Gardner

Memes, GIFs, viral videos – while the tone of social media is often more casual than other marketing channels, that doesn’t mean that your approach should be any less strategic. Sure, it’s easy to send out a tweet or post an update on your Facebook page in a matter of minutes, but it’s important to ensure that all of the content you share helps you achieve your social media goals – which means you have to actually define what those goals are. While setting your goals is your first step towards social media success, we’re going to walk you through how to determine the right goals for you, how they’ll help you create more successful content, and how to shift your goals as needed.

How to define your social media goals

First step: establish your goals! For a small- to medium-sized business, your goals may be to gain more followers, to achieve higher engagement levels, to better display your business’ offerings online, or to make more connections in your community. If you’re a not-for-profit, your primary goals may be to turn your followers into donors, to solicit donations, to promote special events and initiatives, or to foster dialogue about relevant local issues. While you can choose to set as many goals as you think are appropriate, try to prioritize the top three goals to focus your efforts. These should be the top priorities for your brand at the current time and likely fall in line with your goals for the organization at large. These goals can always shift later on as your needs change – in fact, we recommend that you plan to regularly reassess your social media goals to ensure that the work you’re doing is helping you reach them successfully. (Keep reading for more!)

How setting your social media goals will help you create more successful content

While establishing your goals is an essential step in making your social media channels more successful, it’s not just achieving the goals that’s important. Determining your social media goals goes hand-in-hand with identifying the actual purpose of your social media accounts, which helps you ensure that the content you’re sharing is always on brand and aligns with your organization’s mission statement. Your social media presence should always remain cohesive, and having clear goals helps you maintain that consistency.

Once you decide on which of your social media goals are your top priorities, you’ll also find that it’s easier to choose what to share on your channels, because you’ll want to ensure your content ideas are always contributing towards your goals. 

Don’t forget to reassess your goals regularly and shift gears as necessary

Remember that once you set your goals, they’re always movable! While establishing your goals helps you stay on track, the reality is that sometimes your needs change, which means that your goals should shift, too. For example, maybe you’re a yoga studio whose initial social media goals were to achieve higher engagement levels and stronger loyalty from your members, but when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, you had to quickly transition into running online classes. As a result, your new primary goal is to inform your members of your new offerings and to encourage them to help spread the word to their friends. Regularly evaluating your goals and determining whether you’re actually achieving them is a crucial step towards social media success. We recommend you schedule quarterly or twice yearly social media goal check-ins to help keep them in line with your needs.