If you have a business or professional brand, you probably already know the importance of using social media, but are you using your social platforms correctly? It’s easy to get into a routine of posting the same content pushing your products, your brand, or even just funny memes, but that doesn’t mean your posts are effective or contributing to your social strategy. Setting clear goals and knowing how to track them are important to ensure your time is well spent with high-performing posts. Let’s break down a few goals you might have for your social platforms and how to achieve them.

Growing your brand is a goal for those just starting out on social media as well as for those who simply want to reach a larger audience. When your goal is to illuminate your current and potential audience, you should be focusing on awareness metrics. These metrics include brand awareness, follower growth rate, post reach, and mentions. 

You will want to focus on increasing your organic reach to grow your brand, which can be more simply done once you’ve developed your brand identity. If you still aren’t seeing the growth you’d like, try adding paid advertising within social platforms to your strategy to reach a larger audience in a shorter amount of time.

Having customers is great, but having customers who also advocate and interact with your brand is even better! Engagement on posts and your overall account is a good way to determine if you’re reaching the right people with your content. Measure comments, likes, shares, and mentions to see which posts are performing well. Be sure to engage back with those who are responsive to your brand! No one wants to leave a comment or send a message and feel like it’s shooting off into the abyss never to be heard from again!

Tip: Another benefit of engagement through mentions is now you have user-generated content that can be reshared in posts or on stories and act as testimonials for your brand!

If you’re using social media for your brand you probably are trying to reach a consumer to provide them with something. Whether it’s a product or a service, you’ll want to know if your audience is interacting with your content and taking the desired action on your page. There are tons of ways to track conversion including using tracking links in the call-to-action on your posts and setting up analytics tools to track where people go after reaching your website. However, you choose to track conversion, crunching the numbers to understand what content drives your audience to convert to your target action can help you better understand your audience and curate posts more suitable for them.

We’ve all read the quotes about dreams being just that until you set goals to reach them, and social strategy is the same. Until you’ve set goals, assigned reasonable milestones, and are tracking your efforts, you won’t know if the time you’re putting into your social media accounts is useful!