Achieving Common Social Media Goals in the New Year
As we head into a brand new year, this is the perfect time to set goals. You’re probably busy setting goals to achieve in your personal life and your business. But are you setting goals regarding your social media presence? If not, you should be!
Social media goals are important to have so you know what you’re working toward. It’ll allow you to see where you can make improvements and tweak your strategy throughout the year.
The key is to set goals you can get excited about. Then, you need to determine which action steps you can take to get from where you are now to where you want to be.
Achieving Common Social Media Goals in the New Year
How can you know the right steps to take in order to achieve your desired results? In this post, I’ve shared some simple things you can do to make progress. I also have a blog post all about setting Twitter goals. Definitely check that out if you need additional tips.
1. Goal: Grow Your Following
One of the most common social media goals that brands set out to achieve is to gain more followers. Of course, you don’t want to obsess over the numbers. It’s better to have a smaller group of quality followers than it is to have a large following of people who don’t pay attention to the content you share. But still, growth is nice!
If you follow my Twitter Secret Sauce every day, you will see dramatic results! And you’ll become #TwitterSmarter. https://t.co/lPNcbu5PAZ pic.twitter.com/zBG0JiuE3x
— Madalyn Sklar – Digital Marketing since 1996 (@MadalynSklar) December 11, 2020
So, how can you take action and attract new followers across all of your social media platforms? Well, the first piece of advice I’d offer is to be consistent with posting. People are going to have a hard time discovering you if you aren’t actively sharing content. Determine how many times you’d like to post per day on each platform you use. Then, block off some time to batch create your posts and schedule them out.
However, you can’t post just anything. The content you share should still be valuable. Not only that, but it should appeal to your target audience so they’ll be intrigued enough to follow. Always consider what your target audience would have an interest in when posting. Share content that will educate and entertain them.
Metric to Track: Create a spreadsheet and update it with your follower count at the end of each month. If you notice there are months with a lot of growth, see if there’s anything you did differently to bring in new followers. Then, keep doing that!
2. Goal: Boost Engagement Rates
Is there really any point in being on social media if you aren’t using it as a tool to connect with others? And if you aren’t really sparking conversations in your comments or in the DMs, one of your social media goals may be to generate more engagement. It’s a great goal to have and the best part is that it’s not hard to do.
The key is to make sure you’re sharing content that gets people talking. Ask questions of your audience, hold a Q&A session, or share polls. You can even go live and talk to your audience that way. You may even want to reach out to people after they follow you. You can’t sit back and wait for conversations to happen. You need to give them a little push along the way.
I actually have a blog post all about how you can have more conversations on Twitter. It has some great tips that will have you connecting with your community in no time.
Metric to Track: Monitor the amount of people, on average, that comment on your social media posts. You’ll also want to track other mentions that you receive, as well as whether they’re positive comments or not.
3. Goal: Drive More Traffic & Sales
We all want to generate more traffic and sales from our social media presence. After all, it’s how you’re going to make money to keep your business running.
? My New Twitter Article
4 Social Media Trends for 2021https://t.co/M2GiBlsVBq
I’m sharing four trends that are worth your time and attention. You should consider experimenting with these in the year ahead and see how they work for you. #TwitterSmarter pic.twitter.com/MB4AzxgaDm
— Madalyn Sklar – Digital Marketing since 1996 (@MadalynSklar) December 9, 2020
If this is one of your social media goals, you need to make sure you’re actually talking about your content and your offerings. Don’t expect people to find your Twitter profile and click over to your website out of curiosity. I mean, they might. But you want to give them a reason to click. Make them want to visit your blog and see what you’re writing about. Communicate the value of the offerings you provide so they’ll want to learn more.
There’s no point in being shy when it comes to what you’ve created in your business. You’ve put a lot of hard work into your creations and the world deserves to know about it. After all, there are plenty of people out there who are looking for exactly what you have to offer. Just make sure you aren’t making sales pitches 100% of the time. Balance it out with other valuable content too.
Metrics to Track: Pay attention to where your traffic is coming from using tools like Google Analytics. You might want to check out Fathom Analytics. I just started using it and love it! It’s a simple, privacy-focused website analytics tool. You’ll also want to use your social media scheduler or built-in analytics to track link clicks on your social media posts.
4. Goal: Provide Efficient Customer Service
Keeping your customers happy is crucial to the ultimate success of your business. If people aren’t happy, it’s going to reflect poorly on your brand and you’ll be left with a tarnished reputation if it’s an ongoing issue. So, you need a way to communicate with customers should they have questions or complaints about something.
Many brands use social media as a way to quickly and efficiently handle customer service requests. For instance, brands like Verizon and UPS have dedicated Twitter handles for their customers to contact when needed. People love being able to do this because it’s often much faster than making a phone call and waiting on hold.
To improve your customer service via social media in the next year, you’ll want to designate hours where you’ll be available to answer questions. This way, people know when to expect a response. You’ll also want to make sure you answer requests as promptly and politely as possible. This post about using Twitter for customer service should help!
Metrics to Track: You’ll want to keep an eye on how many customer support inquiries come in through social media. And are you/your team able to respond to messages quickly? Are customers ending the conversation satisfied and with a resolution? Strive to handle every inquiry in a timely, respectable fashion.