Setting social media goals is hard.
“How cool would it be to drive 300 sign-ups a month from Facebook Ads?” This is how I tend to go about setting social media goals. I pull an aspirational number out of the air and go for it.
Would it be cool to have a regular, predictable stream of new users coming to Buffer via Facebook Ads? Absolutely!
Is this the right way to set goals?
Coming up with social media goals for our marketing team here at Buffer has often been a bit haphazard for me. Imagine having a system of goal setting to help create rational, achievable goals. This set me out on the research path to look into other popular goal setting strategies and frameworks that exist and seeing how these might work for social media marketing.
Keep reading below to see the amazing strategies that I found.
I love this quote from Thoreau because it emphasizes the process over the end result.
I often find myself wondering what exactly is the best way to set social media goals … or if having no goals at all might be a possibility!
One interesting bit of research I came across is that a study found a 33 percent increase in the completion of goals among those who wrote their goals down, created an action plan and shared with a friend. These people achieved 76 percent of their goals by having a specific goal-setting strategy.
So with this in mind, I thought it’d be interesting to dive into seven of the most popular goal-setting strategies used by marketers and see if any of the ideas here might resonate with you and your social media marketing.
1. S.M.A.R.T.
S for Specific — The more specific you can be with writing down your objective, the easier it will be to clearly see what it is you need to accomplish. Often, answering the five “W” questions — Who, What, Where, Why and Which — can help you achieve greater specificity.
M for Measurable — Can your goal be measured? How will you know when you’ve achieved your goal?
A for Attainable — Another way of putting this is “realistic.” Is it possible to achieve the goal you’ve set for yourself?
R for Relevant — For businesses, a relevant goal means that it has the potential to impact your business objectives, vision or values.
T for Time-bound — Give your goal a deadline.
SMART goals are one of the longest-lasting, most popular goal-setting frameworks for business. Peter Drucker, the founder of modern business management, often is credited for coming up with the basis for SMART, and the specific mnemonics can be traced back to mentions as early as 1981.
SMART has been a successful goal-setting framework for a long time because it is easy to understand, to act on and to follow up with.
For example:
Let’s take Facebook page growth for instance. If you want to set a goal to grow your Facebook page’s likes, here’s what that might look like with the SMART framework.
- Specific — Who? What? Why? “I would like to grow our Facebook page likes because Facebook is a key social media platform that we can learn about and help others grow along with us.”
- Measurable — Choose a specific number for the growth.
- Attainable — Make sure the number is realistic.
- Relevant — Does growing your Facebook page support your business’s objectives, vision or values?
- Time-bound — What deadline will you set?
Goal:
2. Locke and Latham’s 5 principles of goal-setting
1. Clarity — Similar to the specificity from SMART goal-setting, clear goals help immensely with understanding the task at hand, measuring the results and achieving success.
2. Challenge — The goal should be difficult and challenging enough to prove motivating, but not so challenging that it’s impossible to achieve. Using the Inverted U method is a good way to test for appropriate challenge levels.
3. Commitment — Get your teammates to buy into the goal. Involve them in the goal-setting process.
4. Feedback — Measure your progress and seek advice throughout the pursuit toward the goal.
5. Task complexity — Be careful in adding too much complexity to your goals as complexity can impact morale, productivity and motivation.
In the late 1960s, Drs. Edwin Locke and Gary Latham performed much of the research that has informed our theories of goal-setting, showing how goals and feedback can be huge motivating factors for business employees.
Through their research, Locke and Latham settled on the five principles of goal-setting mentioned above.
In one of the studies, Locke performed an analysis of 10 years’ worth of lab and field studies on the effects of goal-setting. For instance, he…