You Ask, I Answer: Setting Social Media Goals for 2020?

In today's episode, Annika asks, what sort of goals should we be setting for social media in 2020? Ah. Oh, that's a very good question. Um here's how I would approach this. If you have existing data, forecast that forward using any time series forecasting tool.

Uh if you were at the Agora Pulse Summit, you saw uh some of those, which by the way, you can still uh register and see that I think for another like three weeks. But any time series forecasting software, Watson Studio, R, Python, all those things. What you want to do is this. You will first understand uh how you currently use social media and if that's how you're going to be using it in 2020. If if you are uh using it for marketing or sales or customer service, and you are planning on more or less continuing what you're doing now, paid, unpaid, and so on and so forth.

That's going to determine the goals that you set. If the you're there's going to be massive changes, like we're gonna stop doing customer service on social media entirely, and that represents you know like 30% of your activity now, it's gonna be a lot harder to do any kind of forecasting and goal setting. But let's say for the most part, you're gonna be doing more or less what you've been doing within reason. For marketing purposes, the simplest goals for any top-of-funnel channel to forecast uh is traffic. How much traffic does this send to the to the properties that we own, and then obviously that traffic then goes down through the marketing operations mechanisms that you have in place to turn into some sort of business impact, whether it's increased customer satisfaction, whether it's uh sales enablement and and accelerating the pipeline, or it's just straight up marketing lead or prospect generation.

It could be any of those things. But traffic is the easiest thing for you to measure in social media because it requires the least amount of setup, and as long as the traffic you send to your website has a correlation, a strong mathematical relationship to that business goal, then traffic's straightforward to measure, right? You don't necessarily have to worry about Bob and Sales showed up drunk again and he disqualified all the perfectly good leads we sent him. Um you don't have to worry about that. So what you should do is take your existing traffic and forecast it forward by channel.

So let me bring this up here. And this, what you're looking at here is a an example of a traffic forecast. So this is for uh my company's website, the Trust Insights website, and what we're looking at here is each channel forecasted forward. So I have all of calendar year 2019 on here, and that's about half of the chart. The left half and the right half is the forecast going forward.

And based on time series forecasting, I can look at this and say, okay, what is likely to happen in the year ahead? Now, is this perfect? No. Is it does it predict the unpredictable? No.

But based on the last couple of years' worth of data, forecasting this forward gives me a pretty good idea of what is likely to happen. For social media, social media is that sort of teal, uh light blue, I don't even know what color that is. Um that's at the bottom there. And I can see that it's now November 2019, and beginning in 2020, we're gonna see about the same or slightly less traffic from social media. Just the the nature of the beast.

We don't pay, uh, we don't do paid social media uh very much, and so it's not really reflected on here, and you can see the our organic social media impact continues to decline. So let's say you had a thousand visits uh from Facebook this year, right? And it resulted in, I don't know, X number of conversions, then five percent more Facebook traffic should logically yield five percent more conversions down the road. So for social media's purposes for goal setting, your goal instead of a thousand visits, if you want five percent more conversions later on, would be five percent more traffic from Facebook now, or one thousand and fifty visits in twenty twenty. Now you can do these these forecasts either by channel, which I've sort of lumped social media here all together in one, or you can break it out by individual source and medium.

That gets that gets messy. Um a lot of forecasting software has trouble at a certain point dealing with you know a channel that sends you one visit. Uh so you may want to do some filtering if you want to do it by individual tactical channel like Facebook or Instagram or YouTube or whatever. But in aggregate, uh you can put together some pretty good forecasts that will give you overall baselines and then maybe look at percentages and say, well, Facebook's about 40% of our social media traffic. So of that thousand visitors in aggregate that we're looking at, Facebook should be responsible for about 400 of them.

Right? That's probably a simpler way to figure out what the goals for each channel and each individual tactical channel are. Ultimately, you want those goals to be guides, right? Say we we need a thousand visits, and then divide that by twelve, and you will get uh my math isn't that good, eighty-three point three repeating visits a month from social media. That gives you a diagnostic.

That's a lot more useful than a d an annual goal. So make sure you think about those milestones as well. If it's January 29th and you've gotten 50 visits from Facebook, you're like, you know what, we're not going to hit our January goal. Uh, and as a result, we may miss uh our our upcoming yearly goal. That's one of the reasons why these forecasts are broken out by either a month or a quarter, so that you can look back and go, gosh, you know, for January 2020, we are forecasting uh on this one 369 visits from social.

If we don't get anywhere close to that by January 15th, or we're like at five, like, okay, we're gonna miss that goal. So either we need to change what we're doing, or we need to update our forecasts to say, yeah, it's gonna be uh uh not a great year for for Facebook um in our based on our our forecasting forward. So that's that's how you use these things. That's how you set goals. Set a big goal, absolutely, break it out into milestones, and then measure against those milestones to give you diagnostics that let you make decisions and make changes before it's too late, because you don't want to get to this time next year, you know, late in the year, and go, well, we set a goal of a thousand visits and we're at four hundred.

You're like, well, not gonna get that bonus this year. So that's the process. Take your existing channel data out of Google Analytics, forecast it forward using the the statistical tool of your choice, and then build the forecast and measure against it. Shameless plug. If you want help doing this because you don't have statistical software, or it's just not your bag, let us know at Trust Insights.

We are more than happy to help you. Uh build that out. As always, please leave your questions in the comments box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter. I'll talk to you soon.

Take care. Want help solving your company's data, analytics, and digital marketing problems? Visit TrustInsights.ai today and let us know how we can help you.