How to Set Achievable Social Media Goals for Your Brand

As you’re building out your social media strategy, one of the key components that’s going to guide everything—your content ideas, platforms, messaging, and more—is the social media goals you set.

Your social media goals should align with your overall business objectives and give you something tangible to work towards as you create and implement your strategy.

But you don’t want abstract goals, like “grow followers” or “post more.” How will you know if you’ve reached the threshold that will actually make an impact?

To help, we’ve put together this guide on setting achievable goals that will help your social media team impact your brand’s bottom line. Read on to discover more about setting tangible goals (plus some goal examples you can pull from).

What are social media goals?

Social media goals are objectives you set that you work to achieve through the content you share on your brand’s social media platforms. These should be created with your business goals in mind to ensure your social media strategy and overall growth strategy are aligned.

Some examples of basic social media goals can include:

• Increase brand awareness
• Drive website traffic
• Grow social media followers
• Generate leads
• Boost sales and conversions

However, it’s important to be much more specific with your goals so you actually have something tangible to work towards. But we’ll get more into that shortly.

Why is it important to set social media goals for your brand?

Before we really dive in, let’s make sure you understand why this is so important. 

You might be here because you’re just looking for some ideas of goals to add into your strategy, and while it’s always a good idea to look around for inspiration, you need your goals to actually cater to your specific business.

Setting social media goals gives you something to work towards that also aligns with the goals that your business has.

Let’s look at a concrete example.

Say you’re running Instagram and TikTok for an ecommerce brand that sells hair scrunchies that won’t leave a dent when someone takes it out of their hair. This is a cool product (and if you’re selling one IRL, let me know because I need it), but you probably need to get the word out a bit more about things like:

• What your product is
• What the selling point is
• Why people might want to buy it
• Who might need it

Some of the brand’s overall goals this year might be to boost brand awareness around its product and its existence as well as to boost sales.

So you need social media goals that align with those. Otherwise, you’re just posting just to post. And sure, maybe some presence is better than no presence, but it can also mean that you’re not actually going to get the results you or your team are hoping for.

Bottom line: Social media goals are important because they give your strategy purpose. They help you understand what to create and why.

Now let’s get into it.

How to set achievable social media goals

If you’ve been tasked to outline your social media goals for the year, you might have put something down like:

• Grow Instagram followers
• Send more traffic to your website
• Make sales

Okay…but what does it look like for you to actually achieve that? Cool, you’ve gotten two new followers. Technically you grew your Instagram followers—are you done? Can you mark that off your list?

Not likely.

This is why you need to take the time to sit down and make social media goals that are structured and achievable.

Because on the other side of the coin, you also don’t want to set goals that are simply unrealistic. You’ve got 3,000 followers and you want to hit 100k this year? Let’s…come back to earth a little bit.

Follow these steps to create social media goals that are:

• Aligned with business objectives
• Something to work towards
• Realistic and achievable based on your starting line

1. Compile your business objectives

Your first step is to talk to whoever’s in charge of the business side of things. This might be your CEO, your team leader, your client, your CMO, what have you. Get together with them to learn what their overall business goals are for the year.

They might be:

• Boosting profits
• Generating better brand recognition and awareness
• Scaling the team
• Growing the online presence

Whatever they’re hoping to achieve this year should give you a starting point for your social media goals.

For example, if your team leader wants to boost profits, you should be looking at goals that help you generate more sales with less overhead. Or if your client tells you this year is about growing awareness of the brand as a whole, you might want to center your goals around following and engagement.

Your job now is to listen to those business objectives and strategically build a plan to help the company work towards them through your social media efforts.

2. Use the SMART goal framework

To do that, you need to use the SMART goal framework. It stands for:

• Specific: Lay out clearly defined parameters for your goals
• Measurable: Give yourself a measurable end result for each goal
• Achievable: Consider your starting point and resources to set realistic goals
• Relevant: Align your goals with your business objectives
• Time-bound: Give yourself set timeframes to achieve your goals

So your client wants to generate more revenue this year. SMART social media goals that would line up with that objective may be:

• Increase Instagram shop sales by 25% quarter-over-quarter
• Increase website traffic from social media by 15% within the next quarter
• Achieve a 3% conversion rate on social media ad campaigns within 90 days

Essentially, you need to think about the things you can do on social media to contribute to those overall goals, then use the SMART framework to set up your goals.

3. Determine the metrics you need to track

Once that’s done, you’ll want to put together a report for all of the metrics you’ll need to track as you work towards your goals.

Let’s use the goals we just put together as examples here.

• If you have a goal to increase Instagram shop sales, you’ll want to keep track of how many sales you’re making each week or month
• If you’re looking to boost website traffic through social media content, you’ll need to monitor how much referral traffic is coming from social media sites to your website
• And if you’re looking to boost your ad campaign’s conversion rate, you’ll need to monitor conversions coming directly from your campaign

Use tools like Google Analytics, Vista Social, and whatever ad platform you’re running on to help you build a report that can track each key metric.

4. Continue to monitor your progress

The goals we set were quarterly goals, which mean you’ve given yourself a quarter (or three months) to achieve them. Throughout the quarter, pay attention to your progress to see if you’re on the right track or if you need to tweak your strategy a bit to get back on track.

Use a project management tool or a Google Doc to track your progress as a way to keep yourself accountable throughout the timeframe for each goal.

15 examples of social media goals to strive for

Need some inspiration on social media goals that might help you hit those overall company objectives? We’ve got some set examples of SMART social media goals that you can choose from and adjust to fit your needs.

For increasing brand awareness and growth:

• Increase Instagram followers by 25% (from 10k to 12.5k) by the end of Q2 through consistent posting and influencer partnerships
• Boost brand mention volume by 30% over the next 6 months by launching a branded hashtag campaign
• Grow LinkedIn company page followers from 5,000 to 7,500 within 4 months through thought leadership content

For boosting engagement:

• Improve average engagement rate from 2.8% to 4% across all platforms within 90 days by testing video content formats
• Increase comment response rate to 95% within 2 weeks by implementing a dedicated community management workflow
• Generate 500 user-generated content posts with our branded hashtag by December 31st through monthly contests

For improving content performance:

• Achieve 100,000 video views per month on TikTok by Q3 through daily posting and trend participation
• Increase average watch time on Instagram Reels from 45% to 65% within 60 days by optimizing hook strategies
• Boost content shares by 40% in the next quarter by creating more educational, shareable infographics

For generating traffic and conversions:

• Drive 5,000 monthly clicks from social media to the blog by the end of Q2
• Increase social media referral traffic by 35% in 6 months through DM automation
• Increase social media-driven product page visits by 50% (from 2,000 to 3,000 monthly visits) within the next quarter through targeted promotional posts and Stories with link stickers

For building a community:

• Grow Facebook Group to 2,000 active members by end of year with weekly exclusive content
• Achieve 80% weekly participation rate in interactive content (polls, Q&As, challenges) within our Instagram community over the next 2 months by posting 3 engagement-focused Stories per week
• Reduce average response time to DMs and comments from 4 hours to under 1 hour within 30 days by implementing social inbox automations

Build out your strategy based on your social media goals

Your social media goals should help inform your strategy. If you want to grow followers, you need to create content that’s going to appeal to your audience. If you want to boost engagement, you need to test hooks and content formats that people want to interact with.

And along the way, you need the right social media management tool that can help you reach your goals. Create a Vista Social account to find all the features you need to grow your brand presence.