Lessons Learned: Setting Goals in Social Media

by Serena Ehrlich, SVP Social Media on December 7, 2009

Editor’s note: This is part 3 in the series of Lessons Learned: Easy tips on how to create and grow a social media program. This series includes a discussion on the following topics:

Create a Social Media Policy
Research your business
Set goals
Write an Editorial Calendar
Create content
Start the program
Grow your social media program and overall web presence
Handling mistakes and attacks

Set Goals

Setting goals is one of the most daunting yet easiest things to do in social media. First it must be noted that every company has a different set of goals for social media. For some, it is simply raising awareness or using social media to help disseminate company messaging, for others it is email capture or to drive traffic to a website for a sale. It is important that you establish what you want to measure before you begin. Here are a few examples of popular social media goals, including how to track relationship building or website traffic:

Increased online relationships # of interactions between you and customer, retweets

Increase communication Track increase # of conversations about product/term

Email gathering # of traffic to email form, # of email addresses gathered

Increage Website Traffic # of inbound traffic (from Google Analytics)

I highly recommend using www.kdpaine.com as a reference guide when establishing your goals. From her site you can select the type of company you are from the left sidebar. From here she provides guidance on how to determine your goal and how to measure your social media interactions and how they relate to that goal.