Establishing your brand on Social Media is arguably one of the most important steps you can take to generate leads, increase brand awareness, and develop a relationship with your customer base. However, as tempting as it may be to just jump into it and create accounts on every platform you can get your hands on, you need to think strategically about what you are trying to accomplish.

SMART Goals

Long touted as the best way to set goals—and with good reason—setting SMART goals can help you come up with a roadmap for where you are, where you want to go, and how you will know once you get there.

SMART is an acronym for SPECIFIC, MEASURABLE, ACHIEVABLE, REALISTIC AND TIMELY goals.

Specific: Set clearly defined goals

Specificity is a key aspect of setting a solid goal. For example, “Do more Twitter” is not as good a goal as “Post on Twitter 4 times a week”. In turn, “Post 2 original tweets, and 2 retweets per week” is even better. Decide the ‘Who, What, Where, When, Why and How’ of the process before embarking on your social media endeavors.

Doing this will definitely help keep you on track, as these little items on your to-do list really do start to add up!

Measurable: Use relevant metrics to gauge your progress

Although this can be tedious, with all the analytics and resources available, there is no excuse for you not to track how your audience is actually engaging with your content. The metrics you choose to track will vary from platform to platform (e.g. Twitter’s engagement can be measured in terms of Impressions and Retweets, while Facebook will have a heavy emphasis on Likes and Shares).

Achievable: Is your goal reasonably attainable?

While goals should be challenging, they shouldn’t be so ambitious that they are impossible to achieve. Social media is certainly a marathon, not a sprint. So set goals that will keep you moving forward, but are ultimately doable from a reasonable standpoint.

Realistic: Your goals should take into account the time, resources, and energy that you are able to invest into achieving them.

Rome wasn’t built in a day. So, while Aiming for the stars is all well and good, your goals need to be grounded in reality. The difference between an Achievable goal and a Realistic one is that a goal might theoretically be achievable (e.g. maintaining a regular presence across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and your company blog), but is it realistic? Can you, assuming you’re the only one in charge of all these channels, reasonably expect to manage all this, and still not compromise on quality? Probably not.

Timely: Your social media goals must have a stipulated time frame.

These could be daily goals (like meeting a certain number of Twitter posts per day) or more long-term (like doubling your social media reach in 3 months). As long as you have a deadline, it can provide the right motivation to not get complacent, and keep you working towards meeting your goals.

Was this post helpful to you? Let us know in the comments what goals and strategies you have used in the past to increase your reach on social media!

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