SMART GOALS

FOR SOCIAL
MEDIA STRATEGY
TABLE OF CONTENTS

● What is the SMART framework?

● Why use SMART goals?
● How to fill out the SMART framework
● How to use your finished SMART goals framework to develop your social
media strategy/plan
● Evaluate your progress

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WHAT IS THE SMART FRAMEWORK?

SMART is an acronym for a framework that helps with any type of

project or business. Taking the time to fill out the SMART
framework—specific, measurable, achievable, results-focused, and
time-bound—can help you frame your social media strategy in a way
that brings results.

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WHY USE SMART GOALS?

Your success depends on the goals you set, and the likelihood of
meeting those goals depends on how the goal is framed. Using the
SMART framework assures that you are setting goals you can
actually achieve and can prove in some way you achieved them. For
the social media manager, SMART goals are crucial to success;
social media marketing is highly scrutinized by the C-suite and
some social media managers are held to a higher standard to prove
ROI than their peers in traditional marketing.

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A GUIDE TO SETTING SMART GOALS

Specific. First, name the goal with specific language. Goals that are too broad aren’t
attainable because the boundaries of the goal are fuzzy, resulting in not knowing if you
have ever reached the goal. For example, the goal of “build awareness of our products” is
too broad. A goal that is more specific might be “achieve an average reach of 3,400 on
Facebook posts this year.”

Examples of vague goals and how to make them more specific:

Too vague Try this:

Gain more customer satisfaction Increase average Yelp rating

Increase social media engagement Increase comments on our Instagram posts

Make customers feel special Send customers personal Twitter replies

Sell more products Sell more products via the online store

Measurable. A goal that is measurable is quantified in some way. If your goal contains a
number, even better: an upper limit to reach or surpass, a percentage growth relative to
last year, etc. In the example above, I chose an average reach of 3,400. I can actually
measure my post reach over the year and prove whether or not hit that goal.
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Using our examples from above, let’s make our goals measurable:

● Increase average Yelp rating from 4 to 4.5 stars

● Increase comments on our Instagram posts to 14 per post
● Send 30 customers personal Twitter replies
● Sell 5% more products via the online store

Achievable. Goals that are achievable are realistic. Not too pessimistic (meaning too easy)
and not too optimistic (meaning impossible). Give yourself a goal that pushes and
challenges you, but is something that can be achieved.

For the goal to be achievable, there also has to be something about the goal that moves it
yet-to-be-achieved to achieved. Vague goals can never be achieved; they could go on
forever. An achievable goal is one that can break down into a tactical plan with tasks you
can do. A goal itself can’t be done—it is the result—but what makes it a goal is its
achievable quality, or the fact that it can be incrementally achieved through tasks as parts
that make up the whole.

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Let’s add some achievable steps to our examples from above:

● Increase average Yelp rating from 4 to 4.5 stars

○ Include a link to your Yelp profile in your email footer with the text “Find
us on Yelp!”
○ Respond personally to each 1- and 2-star review
● Increase comments on our Instagram posts to 14 per post
○ Post questions that encourage responses
○ Ask customers to vote between two choices
● Send 30 customers personal Twitter replies
○ Identify customers on Twitter talking about our product/service
○ Attach unique GIFs to Twitter replies
● Sell 5% more products via the online store
○ Include links to products in at least a third of our social posts
○ Offer a promotion for those who shop online

Results-focused. Realistic goals are also results-focused. If you set a goal that has no result
or impact on your business, you will be wasting time. For example, getting 10,000 Twitter
followers is not a goal. There’s no clear result or “why.” Sure, it might be achievable,
measurable, and even specific, but once reached it should have impact.

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To make sure your goal is results-focused, add a “because” clause.

● Increase average Yelp rating from 4 to 4.5 stars because I believe it will cause
more customers to dine at our restaurant than at our biggest competitor’s.
● Increase comments on our Instagram posts to 14 per post because it will increase
our reach in people’s Instagram feeds.
● Send 30 customers personal Twitter replies because I believe it will improve
customer sentiment and improve long-term sales and customer retention.
● Sell 5% more products via the online store because it will help decrease our
average selling (or SG&A) cost per good sold.

Time-bound. For example, a goal to “increase engagement” has no end point. If you
increase engagement from yesterday to today, are you done? Or is it an annual goal?

Give your goal a deadline and put it on your calendar. If it is a large annual goal with a
metric that is a number, then divide that number by twelve months and now you have
monthly mini-goals to reach that will get you to your end goal.

We live in a universe that experiences the passage of time, but each culture also has
seasons and special markers of time that affect our goals. Many people tend to make
goals for the year because most cultures have some sort of new year, whether it is in
January or another month.

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In higher education, the calendar starts in the fall and finishes at the end of spring, at
which point summer planning starts. Some industries report each fiscal quarter.
Determine the industry and cultural context for your business and make goals that make
sense within that context.

Finally, what’s your deadline? Let’s add a deadline to our examples:

● Increase average Yelp rating from 4 to 4.5 stars by the end of the fiscal year.
● Increase comments on our Instagram posts to 14 per post by August 1, when our
new fall line launches.
● Send 30 customers personal Twitter replies every week.
● Sell 5% more products via the online store by June 15.

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INTEGRATING YOUR SMART GOALS INTO YOUR SOCIAL
MEDIA STRATEGY

To integrate SMART goals into your social media strategy, I recommend you start
backwards.

Time. You are firstly time-bound, so get out your calendar and start marking off when you
will gather, analyze, and report on your metrics. Perhaps it is the end of the calendar year.
It could also be 6 weeks from when you launch a new product. Give yourself a deadline.

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Result. Next, write into the dates the results you are expecting to see due to your efforts
within that time period. What outcomes should you see on those deadlines? Perhaps you
want to make a certain amount of revenue from a specific product by the end of the
calendar year.

Achievement. What do you need to achieve to get those results? This is the action plan or
tactics that have to happen for you to get the results you expect. If you need to sell 5,000
units of one product by your deadline, then you can start to brainstorm the social media
content and engagement within your power to get you there. This is the step where you’ll
get your content calendar out and strategize what you will do every day until the deadline
you set for the result you’re looking for.

For example, if every time you tweet a link and photo to your product you get X
clickthroughs, and a certain percentage Y% of those clickthroughs put the product in their
online cart, then you have a conversion rate to help you know how many times you’ll need
to tweet a link to the product page before you get to your deadline date.

If it turns out you’d have to tweet about that product ten times per day, and that’s a bit
much for your audience to handle, you will have to figure out a strategy for getting more
people to that product page without being the most spammy business online.

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Think about changing your Twitter bio’s website field to that specific product page.
Consider pinning to Pinterest. Run a user-generated social media campaign that goes up
to a week before your deadline for customers to get a shout-out, free product, discount,
or some other benefit for posting about the product.

Metric. When you report, define the metrics and what you achieved, but also the impact
of those metrics. Is there a dollar amount associated with the metrics? A qualitative
impact on brand equity? Clickthroughs on links, likes, comments or answers to questions,
these are all examples of metrics that can measure your achievements.

Specific. Now review each of the steps above for specificity. Is your time an actual date?
It’s hard to achieve results when the deadline is “ASAP,” “soon,” “sometime next year,” or
“when it feels right.” The result you set for your goal also should be specific. Quantify it
with dollars, number of units, percent growth, or whatever it is you want. It’s not a result
if it’s as vague as “sell a lot of products” or “be successful.”

Next are the achievable social media tactics in your calendar. How many times will you
tweet per day? What call to action (CTA) will the content need to contain (e.g., a link to
your website, email signup form, a specific product)? What channels will you use and what
messaging and frequency will they require to get you to the results you want?

And are your metrics specific? Do you want to measure clicks on links in general, or do
you specifically want to measure the clicks on the links to the product page?
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USE TOOLS TO HELP YOU ACHIEVE YOUR SMART GOALS

A social media management tool is critical to achieving your goals because it allows you to
act on the different SMART criteria of your goals. For example, with a tool like Agorapulse,
you can schedule content in advance and re-queue that content to continue posting
through an end date. This allows you to promote a product or service for a specific
amount of time. Choose a social media tool that has reporting capabilities so you can
assess the measurable aspect of your goals.

Agorapulse, for example, has social media reports that help you assess your quantitative
progress toward your measurable goal. What is unique to Agorapulse, for example, shows
in its Facebook report how many comments and mentions I have reviewed and my
response time.

So, if my goal is to reply to all social media messages with an average response time of 12
hours, Agorapulse keeps me accountable by showing my progress toward that goal. 13
EVALUATE YOUR PROGRESS

After you have set your SMART goal, don’t forget to report and evaluate. Did you make
your deadline? If not, given how far you got, calculate when you might actually get there.
How far off was your estimate? Did you achieve your result in full or in part? What is the
gap between your goal and your achievement? Did you surpass your goals or did you fall
short, and by what magnitude? This will help you set more appropriate goals next time.

Setting the right goals and your plan for achieving them takes as much work as actually
achieving them! However, it’s worth the upfront effort to get it right. The metaphor I use
is: you don’t want to hastily put down a train track to get your train moving, but end up in
New York when you wanted to arrive in Miami. If the goal is important to you, use the
SMART framework and you will end up where you wanted to go.

Good luck!

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stephanie Leishman helps organizations succeed with social media. She has helped 120+
organizations with their digital marketing strategy. She was MIT’s first Social Media
Strategist. She left MIT to start Apiarity, a social media company. Stephanie has helped
many higher-ed, startup, and non-profit clients, as well as for-profit clients in the
consumer, retail, and food & beverage industries. She has an MBA (with marketing and
entrepreneurship concentrations) and a Master of Science in Information Systems
(emphasis on digital innovation).

stephanie@apiarity.com
Twitter: @hatchsteph
LinkedIn: Stephanie Hatch
Apiarity.com

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EASILY REACH YOUR SOCIAL
MEDIA GOALS
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