A Radically Different Approach to Setting Social Media Marketing Goals

Roadblocks in Setting Social Media Marketing Goals

For large organizations with complex teams who might be dispersed around the country or the globe, there are often significant roadblocks to estimating and capturing social media data in traditional ways. This can make it difficult to set social media marketing goals. This is also a common workflow problem for groups of nonprofits who are partnering together on an awareness or fundraising campaign.

Some of the common obstacles I've observed in my social media audit practice include:

1. Using Different Tools

This can be a problem for both groups of organizations working toward a common goal, and for geographically dispersed teams, or teams across several departments.

Some orgs and departments will not prioritize professional social media management tools in their budgets, or won't allow social media managers to select the tools they'd like to be using.

2. Different Philosophies

When you are working with diverse teams or organizations you may not have a shared understanding of the metrics that matter.

3. Differences in Knowledege

On very large teams, it's common for some people to have advanced skills, and others to have a more rudimentary understanding of social media management and metrics.

4. Access to Ad Spend

Teams who have adequate spend to support their efforts will have an easier time reaching goals than teams who don't. 

Let's Consider a Radically Different Approach

There are a range of tactics for addressing differences in philosophies and knowledge, such as peer-to-peer mentoring or educational brown bag lunches. When teams are using different tools or have different levels of knowledge, templated reports can help you collect information in a standardized way.

But let’s consider for a moment, what would happen if we threw our social media goals out the window and took a radically different approach to setting goals for shared campaigns.

Working Together Toward a Common Goal

In bike racing, a peloton works together to achieve a common goal.

We All Share the Same Finish Line

A joint campaign, executed by several teams, departments, or partner organizations, might have common key messages or even a library or shared social media content. 
 
What would happen if, instead of trying to collect metrics and reports from a number of different people, groups, or organizations, who all have different reporting workflows, that we gave each person a simple target based on the size of their audience and empowered them to meet that target on their own timeline, using the content and schedule that they felt would best fit their program?

If we think about a campaign as a road race that happens over a month, a quarter or a year, it might be helpful to establish a starting line that is tied to the size of the partner's account.

​(For a longer campaign, you might want to multiply that number by the number of months in the campaign.)

Example of Simplified Social Media Goals

Size of Account	Impressions Goal	Website Clicks Goal	Conversions Goal
100,000	100,000	2,000	40
10,000	10,000	200	4
1,000	1,000	20	1

For the individual social media manager, the task is then to get to the finish line by doing whatever they need to do to reach that goal.

For some groups, it might only take one or two posts, within a library of shared content, to hit their individual target. For others, they may need to post a number of times over a longer period of time in order to hit their goals. And that’s okay. Reaching the finish line is what matters.
 
As long as you enforce where the finish line is (our expectation is that we all need to reach this point) your role becomes less taskmaster and more coach and cheerleader. Individual managers or groups will be empowered to complete the race in a way that makes sense to them. 

Gathering Success Metrics

Here's the best part of this approach: it vastly simplifies the problem of collecting metrics to create a campaign report.

Instead of tracking people down at the end of the campaign, and gathering disparate spreadsheets and reports, doing a lot of manual tabulation and analysis across accounts, you can instead ask this team two simple questions:

1. Did you hit your goal? If not, what were your results?
2. Was your goal too easy, just right, or too hard?
3. Any other successes you'd like to share with us?

 
The answer to the first question gives you the metric to report your success as a group.

The second question will tell you if you need to adjust your goals in the future.

The third question gives you open-ended qualitative data on how things went.
​ 
What approach to you take to setting social media goals? Learn about other solutions to common social media workflow issues in our earlier blog post.

Sarah Best

CEO and Chief Strategist of Sarah Best Strategy, a boutique agency. Award-wining social media strategy, social media advertising, content strategy & marketing consulting services. ​Follow us on Facebook, connect with me on Linkedin.