The Importance of setting Social Media Marketing Goals

Social Media is a hot topic and people who were in the camp of “I’ll never use that” are starting to ask questions about it……very interesting. 2011 is the year that Social Media becomes mainstream like websites 8 years ago. Like anything in life, if you don’t think about what you want to achieve and what you want to gain from doing something, you will undoubtedly fall short. Main Social Media Marketing Metrics and Goal Setting So what do you want to achieve? * Traffic / Leads / Sales * Brand Awareness * Mentions of your company * Customer Satisfaction Setting your Social Media goal numbers and their exact number is dependent on what you want to get out of Social Media and the resources you have at your disposal to achieve these. Develop A Plan Your Social Media plan should outline the activities you need to undertake to meet your goals. It should be noted that your goals should be realistic based on the resources you have at your disposal. There is no point saying you want to make 100 sales a week if you only spend 5 minutes a week. As a guide, you should spend 30 mins per day on Social Media activities to ensure you get your message out to as many people and can engage with the ones who like what you are saying. Measurement of Success In any marketing effort, the measurement of success is vital and there are a number of tools that can be used to identify numbers for the metrics mentioned above. These include Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, Twitter Counter, YouTube insights. Once you have some statistics on what is working and what is not working , feed that information back into the plan and goals and repeat.