A large number of companies and marketers struggle to find their groove when it comes to identifying and finalizing their social media goals. 

So, if you’re struggling, you’re not alone.

However, setting goals is an important part of your overall social media marketing strategy, as it can help guide your budget, hold you accountable, and help you pay attention to the data.

Setting goals gives you purpose and allows you a chance to see how well you’re doing.

But even with all these benefits, many companies overlook the importance of identifying SMART social media goals.

Below, we will delve into what SMART social media goals are, how to set them, and which ones you should be tracking.

#3: Enhance Community Engagement

People have shorter and shorter attention spans, especially when they’re online. Therefore, it can be difficult to grab the attention of an individual on social media.

However, difficult does not mean impossible. You just need to learn what it is your audience is looking for.

This often begins by building a relationship and encouraging conversations with your audience. 

In doing so, when the time comes to launch a brand-new product or announce a sale, you will have a community ready to listen at your fingertips.

In order to build and engage your community using SMART social media goals, you may want to:

• Increase your Facebook Live viewers by 25% next quarter.
• Reach a minimum of 25 comments on each Facebook post within three months.
• Increase your social shares on all social media channels by 25% this year.

Some of the most important social media metrics you should pay attention to include the number of likes, comments, shares, and mentions, follower count, live viewers, social media click-through rates, bounce rate, and web traffic that is referred through social media.

#4: Grow Your Audience

More and more people are starting to use social media. In fact, it is expected that there will be nearly 4 billion people using social media in 2022.

With this type of growth, it makes sense that brands would turn to social media to find new customers.

It doesn’t matter whether you want to focus on a single social media platform or if you want to try to tackle multiple networks, you must figure out a way to grow your audience.

Content will be key here and identifying when the best time of day (and what day) to post is. Contests and giveaways can be great for attracting new customers.

But if you’ve ever tried tracking what actually gets people interested, you know it isn’t always the content you expect. Sometimes that random meme or a spontaneous live Q&A brings in more buzz than the shiny, polished video you spent weeks producing. People catch on to authenticity, and honestly, they get bored of brands that play it too safe with their posts. It can help to check out your competitors too—not in a copycat way, just to see what seems to work (or bomb) with similar audiences.

Also, there’s something to be said for adjusting your expectations. Social platforms are always shifting how they surface content, so those old strategies from even two years ago might not fly in 2025. You’ve got to be ready to experiment. Try new posting times, mess around with formats, or even ask your followers straight-up what they’d like to see more of. Surprising feedback can sometimes become your next big winner.

For your SMART social media goals, you will want to do something like:

• Improve the number of Twitter brand mentions by 7% in quarter one.
• Reach 100 social shares per blog in the first half of the year.
• Boost the number of Facebook post impressions by at least 25% in quarter one.

In order to track your results, pay attention to brand mentions, comments, and tags, follower counts, engagement count, social media post and advertisement impressions, and social shares per social media and blog post.

#5: Boost Website Traffic

Some goals that you have may not necessarily be directly tied to social media itself (although the ones mentioned here thus far have been). 

One goal that you may have that isn’t directly related to social media is increasing traffic to your website.

Regardless of whether you would like to achieve sign-ups, sales, or a little bit of both, you need to pay close attention to what social users do once they arrive on your website.

This information will help you in determining the social ROI overall, in addition to which of your social networks and content pieces are performing the best for you.

Just keep in mind as you move forward with social media to drive traffic to your site that the click-through rate for social media is considerably lower than most other sources for website traffic. 

However, this doesn’t mean that you can’t find success here.

When it comes to your SMART social media goals, some examples include:

• Improve your social ad click-through rates by 5% in six months.
• Boost social media traffic share to 10% this year.
• Improve your Facebook post click-through rates by 3% in six months.

You can keep track of your success by keeping an eye on metrics like clicks, conversions, website traffic, e-mail subscriptions, click-through rates, and traffic share by traffic source.

Wrap Up: Are You Ready to Tackle Your Social Media Goals?

Whether you want to increase brand awareness or boost revenue, setting SMART social media goals can help you take a straightforward approach to realize those goals strategically.

These goals can help you when you feel like you are struggling to be successful.

To ensure your SMART social media goals are put to good use, make sure you are utilizing the social media marketing funnel as part of your overall social media marketing strategy. 

If not, you could be losing out on a significant number of qualified leads and conversions.

Learn more about the social media marketing funnel and how to build one!

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