How to Set SMART Goals in Your Social Media Strategy

SMART is an acronym used to guide the development of measurable goals, meaning each objective should apply to all the elements of SMART. However, SMART goals need not just be applied to business objectives as they also work well when considering your social media strategy. It is a great way to make sure that business objectives are on track to easily apply them to your to social media activity too.

Specific

The first factor of SMART is Specific, which is important because a business should be able to pinpoint the objective to know exactly what the expected outcome needs to be.

For example, instead of a company saying that they want more followers, they should say that they want 85% more followers by 2020 and then work out a way to achieve this goal. This means that whether writing a post, commenting on one or following an account, the business should always be thinking about how the social strategy needs to evolve to get closer to achieving their goals.

Measurable

‘M’ stands for Measurableto ensure that there is a way of monitoring the goal. Applying this to the social strategy and content is important as it helps you to see whether you have hit a goal or not.

Setting a percentage as a goal makes it much easier to measure the results. Using percentages makes enables a business to look at the results that are achieving and also view trends.

Attainable

The next factor of SMART is ‘A’ which stands for attainable or achievable. If a business were to set their expectations too high it may disappoint them when the results are not as good as they had hoped. Business’ should keep their goals on social media within an achievable reach, meaning they could say that they want to grow 100 followers each month and then create a strategy that helps them achieve this goal.

Relevance

The goal that a business sets for their social media marketing has to tie in with the overall business’ objectives. This shows relevance which is the ‘R’ in SMART. A business has to look clearly at what they want to gain from their social media marketing and make sure that it has some relevance to their goals already. They may look at how social media could work for the business. For example, to build an audience or increase their website traffic.

Timely

A business will need to make sure that they stay on track with their goals and make sure that everything they do is of benefit to the business. To do this, they may select certain dates and times to break up a large project and make sure that each element has a deadline. Creating a spreadsheet that allows teams to monitor the progress and deadlines of content is always helpful.

SMART goals are important when measuring the development of a business’ social media because they help to make sure that the strategy is on track to achieve the best possible results.

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