As brands continue to leverage the power of social media to connect with their audience, understanding social media analytics has become more critical than ever. Social media analytics provide valuable insights into how your content is performing, what resonates with your audience, and how you can improve your content strategy moving forward. By analyzing social media data, brands can make data-driven decisions, create better content, and achieve greater success on social media. Firstly, understanding social media analytics helps brands identify what content is resonating with their audience. By analyzing metrics such as engagement rate, reach, and impressions, brands can determine which content is performing well and generating interest among their audience. They can identify the types of posts, topics, or formats that are getting the most likes, comments, shares, and clicks. This information provides valuable insights into what resonates with their audience, and brands can use t...
Setting social media goals is a key step toward proving (and improving) the value of your social media work. Writing your goals down and regularly reporting on your progress also significantly increases the likelihood that you will achieve what you set out to do.
Goals help you chart a course for improvement and success. They allow you to see how effective your efforts are. They give you purpose and direction, in a documented way that you can share with others.
Anyone can pull a lofty goal out of thin air, but that won’t help you improve your business results or even measure progress. For your social media marketing goals to be useful, they need to be realistic and trackable. They also need to be tied to clear objectives that will help you make progress.
Established goal-setting frameworks help you put in the work upfront to create meaningful social media goals that will support your business in the long run. Let's look at the S.M.A.R.T. Framework of setting goals.
The S.M.A.R.T goal framework is all about creating relevant, achievable goals that help support your overall business objectives. The acronym stands for:
- Specific: Be clear. Does “increase engagement” mean you want 100 new followers or 1,000? Making your social media goals specific helps you track progress and measure success.
- Measurable: Every goal needs some kind of metric. “Improve customer service” is a great concept, but it’s not a goal unless you have a way to measure that improvement.
- Attainable: Your social media goals should absolutely require you to stretch, but they should be within reach if you put in the required work.
- Relevant: This is the piece that ties your goal-setting back to larger business objectives. If your goal involves increasing Facebook likes, for example, make sure you understand how that will benefit the business.
- Timely: Deadlines keep everyone accountable. Include a timeframe for completion of your goal so you know when to check in on your success. You might also want to include some milestones along the way for incremental check-ins.
The idea is that effective goals embody all of these qualities. Let’s look at an example.
Adidas has set several goals relevant to making their business more sustainable, based around a set of six priorities.
Let’s look at their water goals specifically. Their sustainability plan starts with a value statement: “We value water. Water is essential for life. It is also a key resource for our industry.”
Here’s the associated set of goals:
“By 2020, we will achieve:
- 20% water savings at our strategic suppliers (baseline 2014)
- 50% water savings at our apparel material suppliers (baseline 2014)
- 35% water savings per employee at our own sites (baseline 2008)"
Here’s how the goals align with the S.M.A.R.T. framework:
Specific: They don’t just want water savings, they want specific percentages of water savings in various contexts.
Measurable: Identifying a clear baseline and percentage for improvement means Adidas can measure their progress year by year. The sustainability plan itself refers to “tangible and measurable goals.”
Attainable: It’s hard to judge this from the outside, but the Adidas sustainability plan suggests they’ve calibrated their goals to be challenging but attainable: “It is about being prepared, setting the right pace and having both the drive and stamina to go the distance.”
Relevant: The chosen goals “have a direct impact on the world of sport we operate in.”
Timely: The goals have a set deadline: 2020.