Setting Goals for Social Media

Since the 4^th quarter of 2014, our team has been aggressively focused on setting goals within social media for ourselves and for our clients. Actually re-aligning the goals would be a more accurate description of our focus.

As expected within this tech-centric business, so much continues to change within this marketing niche. A few recent changes:

• Google is going to be indexing tweets from Twitter – huge!
• Instagram is the thing for millennial communication and news sources – are you alienating this audience by not sharing your message here? If you are looking to lower the average age of your customer this should be on your radar for 2015.
• Facebook continues to get smarter about the patterns involved in content popularity. If you, your spouse and your intern are the only people ‘liking’ your company page content then you have already been minimized with your ability to appear to wider audiences. Facebook doesn’t want unauthentic content or inaccurate popularity of content.
• LinkedIn continues to frustrate me, but it has huge benefits if you can align your message with their niche. Which tends to be professionals looking to expand their network for career growth, recruiters, salespeople, etc.

As we look at goals for clients and ourselves the questions we need to ask are mostly related to the audience.

1. How long is the sales cycle?
2. What’s the demographic of our typical buyer?
3. What’s the approval process for financial buy-in?
4. B2B or B2C?
5. What are the competitors doing and how does it appear to be working for them?

For Witmer Group, we have a list of five goals for our social media efforts. I’ll share one with you now. It’s not directly about increasing the sales funnel (which is ideally what all marketing efforts contribute towards) but it’s about the brand and demonstrating our level of expertise.

Our social media efforts convey a level of comfort and expertise with social media.

Our social media efforts show that we understand how to build an audience and broaden the reach of our message.

And…

Our social media efforts demonstrate our awareness on how to increase social conversation with the right people for our business.

I’d love to hear about your social goals for your organization! Talk to you again soon.