It’s always important to set goals for yourself, be it in your personal life, work, or social media. Without goals, it’s hard to hold yourself accountable for making improvements. Goals are how you push yourself to progress and be better, so if you want a more successful social media profile that’s what you need to do—set goals.
Setting goals for social media is a little different than personal or work goals. It’s very important to use analytics to create SMART goals. Here are some tips on doing just that!
SMART Goals and Analytics
SMART stands for specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely. The goals you set should follow those guidelines. There is a more detailed explanation of those guidelines here.
“We set ourselves up for failure by being unrealistic. So let’s make a resolution to turn our unrealistic dreams into attainable social media goals.” – Like A Voss
Most goals should follow these guidelines, but especially when using analytics. For example, you need to be specific. Your goals can’t just be to gain more followers or even to gain 1000 followers. You want to make it as specific as possible like to gain 100 followers a week. You need to make that number realistic as well. If you’ve only been gaining a few followers a week you can’t immediately expect to gain hundreds. Then you want to add to that goal the way you plan on achieving this goal and in how long. Make your goals SMART!
What’s Important to You?
When setting goals you need to decide what is important to you. Sure there are ways to gain a lot of followers quickly, but are they going to benefit you or your business in any way but having a large follower count? Is a lot of followers important to you, or do you want to focus more on engaging the followers you have?
“Sure, vanity metrics are fun to track. But can you tie these simple measures directly to business goals? Will increasing your likes lead to real business value? (In some cases, it very well might. But put in the time to really think about this upfront.)” – Hootsuite
Of course, you probably do want to gain followers anyway, but by using your analytics you can figure out how to gain ones that will engage with you and keep following you. For example, on Instagram, you can see how many people each of your stories reached, how many gained you followers, how many people skipped it, etc. By using this, you can figure out which kind of stories can help you reach your goals.
Figuring out what’s most important to you helps you decide where to focus on your social media campaign. Achievable goals are always specific.
Keeping Track
“Whether or not you’re reaching your goals depends on your ability to monitor your data over time.” – Sprout Social
As you work towards your goals, it’s important to keep a close eye on your analytics. Social media can be unpredictable. Something that was helping you gain followers for the first week might not necessarily be successful in doing that the second week. As your analytics change so should the way you’re using your platform.
Just because you set a plan, to begin with, doesn’t mean you can’t change it. Unwillingness to change based off of your analytics will lead you to plateau or even to lose followers!
Just like real life, you should be setting goals on social media. It’s the most effective way to improve, especially when you use the amazing tool at your disposal—analytics.
Need help setting goals and understanding your analytics? Contact us today to set up a FREE discovery session with our team – we’d love to help!
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