How to Define Your Social media Goals

The first step is to define your social media goals. What business activities are you hoping to inform here? There are many reasons companies do social listening, they include:

Crisis management: During a crisis, when there is a perceived backlash against the business on social media, listening provides insight into the reason and emotion behind the negative content online, allowing internal teams to formulate the most effective responses.

Customer service: More general discovery of issues and grievances around the company and its products.

Brand reputation: Identifying content and conversations that might affect the brand’s reputation, so that it may be addressed.

Content creation: Discovery of consumer insights and trends that could inform future content creation.

Campaign performance tracking: Gathering mentions of campaign collateral and themes (e.g. a hashtag).

Trend and demographic insights: Understanding who your audience is, what they engage with, where and with whom.

B2B sales research: Ahead of sales campaigns, gathering insight into key staff at target companies.

Once you’ve decided on your ultimate social media goals, consult the relevant areas of your business to ensure your insights are consistent with theirs and find out the areas they’d like to know more about.

The customer service team, for example, will require different data to the content team.

Here are some common queries that social listening should help you answer:

• What are the frequently asked questions around the brand?
• What are the most common issues with our products and services?
• What do people love and hate most about us?
• Who are our typical social customers, and our influencers?
• Which audiences are we currently under-serving?
• What are our social followers saying to the wider world?
• What’s the overall sentiment towards our brands, and how do key events in our brand timeline as well as the wider cultural narrative affect this?
• Where are they in the world and how are they different across the globe?
• How does all of the above look for your competitors?

When You Have Defined Your Social Media Goals

Once you are clear on your goals, you are ready to write your Objective. Ensure that you have written a SMART objective to easily determine whether you will achieve what you set out to do.