The Social Media Marketing Book

Goal Setting

Before you start a new marketing initiative, you should set goals for your work. A simple example of this is to aim to generate a certain level of traffic, but as I mentioned before, pure eyeball metrics are problematic. The best goal you can set is for your social marketing efforts to lead to an amount of actual revenue for your business.

Your goals should include specific descriptions of success; don't have a goal of "increasing brand awareness." Rather, define exactly how you will measure awareness and an achievable threshold to shoot for. The actual metrics you'll use to measure your accomplishments toward a goal are called key performance indicators (KPIs). The various data points I detailed earlier can all be KPIs. For instance, if you're trying to increase your reach on Twitter, your KPI could be followers, and your stated goal should include an exact number of followers.

Figure 11-10. The paid version of Clicky offers a "spy" view, where you can watch activity on your site as it occurs.