Julia Miashkova — February 20, 2020 What are your social media goals for 2020? Tangible goals are the cornerstone of any successful social media marketing strategy, but how do you know you picked the right ones for the year ahead?
You take a look at your resources and performance throughout the previous year, as well as industry trends and social data insights. Sometimes, the goals you set lead to excellent results, other times — you learn from your mistakes and re-think the goals for the next year.
To help you hit home on all your current social media goals, I’ve put together a list of goals every social media marketer can nail in 2020. Along with the goals, I included corresponding how-to’s to give you some strategic ideas. All of the recommendations are based on key social media trends and data insights from social media marketing pros, so you can be sure they’ll be of relevance to your marketing work as well.
Ready? Let’s roll!
1. Respond to every important mention
Billions of people go on social media every day. Anywhere from zero to a literal billion of them could be talking about your brand or similar brands in your niche. Social media users might be sharing their experiences with products and services — or voicing concerns and giving suggestions to other users.
The problem is, people aren’t necessarily tagging you or spelling your brand name right, even if they want feedback from the brand. Things get trickier for brands with common or ambiguous words for brand names. The result being, anywhere from zero to a literal billion brand mentions go unnoticed.
How do you catch every important mention of your brand then? Easy — if you’re doing social listening. Social media monitoring lets you tap into every relevant conversation on social media to spot brand mentions, including untagged and misspelled.
Example of an untagged brand mention. Screenshot from Awario.
One of the biggest assets of social listening is its versatile analytics. Once you have non-stop media monitoring set up, you can see the sentiment behind your brand mentions, spot mentions with the biggest reach, and interact with the most important directly in-app. You can also track your reputation, share of voice, monitor marketing campaigns, and reap many more social listening benefits.
How-to:
- Start monitoring your brand mentions with social listening tools. Set up an alert for all mentions of your brand and even your competitor brands. Make sure you include common misspellings or special characters if any.
- Prioritize mentions. Sort brand mentions by date, reach or apply any filtering you want. Social listening tools let you filter all mentions by country, language, sentiment, source — you name it!
- Interact with the most important mentions. You can start interacting with the most important mentions right from the app, engaging with people addressing your brand specifically, be it product feedback or customer support concerns.
2. Master social selling
Selling on social is big. As a brand, you gain a lot from going on social media to find potential customers. If you’re using Instagram’s Checkout or Pinterest’s ‘Shop the Look’ pins, great! Keep doing the good work and boost direct shopping using these tools.
Social media is also the safe space of pre-purchase research, as around 30% of customers aged 16-64 will tell you. The math is simple here: as people are already on social media, why not use the opportunity and ask around for product recommendations from other users? Your job is to make sure these people find your brand first.
Meanwhile, as you’re doing social media listening already, why not use it for lead generation and social selling? Thanks to advanced social data analytics, social media monitoring tools identify potential customers for you. The result being, you can quickly identify people looking for a product like yours and pitch your services before your competitors do.
Leads feed for Google Play Music. Screenshot from Awario.
How-to:
- Join relevant Facebook groups, subreddits, Twitter chats, etc. By becoming a part of social media communities where people look for recommendations, you can identify your potential customers and reach out to them directly.
- Use a social media listening tool to generate leads. A social media monitoring tool equipped with leads detecting functionality is your go-to option for endless lead generation that relies on data analytics. Grab a social listening tool free trial and explore effortless social selling to see if this is something you’d like to invest in.
3. Find micro-influencers
In the same way that people favor real-user product recommendations, smaller influencers tend to appear relatable and trustworthy, helping promote brands on social media and beyond. Although their follower counts are smaller, micro-influencers prove to have more genuine relationships with their audience, therefore bridging potential customers and companies more easily.
By opting for micro-influencers, you can actually afford to collaborate with several of them and see who brings you the most traffic and conversions. Influencer marketing doesn’t have to be a wasteful endeavor. In fact, you can even spot potential brand ambassadors among people already talking about your industry. You guessed it: influencer marketing is yet another perk of social listening.
How-to:
- Find influencers among brand mentions. When you have all mentions of your brand and similar brands on hand, go ahead and sort them by reach to single out influencers. Aim for profiles with under 100K followers — these are your micro-influencers.
- Discover the most prominent names in your niche. Many social listening tools boast influencer detecting features, letting you get acquainted with all of the influential figures in your industry. Again, look out for smaller accounts with under 100K followers and give them a shout-out right from the app.
4. Explore broadcasting and AR
If you prioritize video content — as you well should — prioritize live video content even higher. As more and more brands and social platforms employ live streaming, it becomes somewhat of a staple to serve live video content for immediate user engagement and response.
Go live as often as you can, be it a marketing event, social media contest, important announcement, product launch, or a casual chat. Your audience will appreciate the move.
AR is something more and more companies are embracing as well, with everything from face filters on Instagram and TikTok to AR-powered shoes fitting on native apps. It’s no coincidence that social networks are eager to pick up AR and even encourage users to freely experiment with it.
For brands, this means more exciting technology to adopt when enhancing customers’ social media experience. Give AR a try when planning your social media marketing campaigns and see if this is something that resonates with your audience.
How-to:
- Livestream whenever feasible. Incorporate live videos into your video content plan to see how much it can boost your engagement.
- Create your own AR filters. This is by far the easiest way to implement AR. Not every brand is Gucci enough to integrate an AR feature into its native app. However, you can invest some time into making your own AR filter and join the league of brands offering their customers a fun AR experience.
5. Max your organic reach
Social media comes in all shapes and sizes. Naturally, what works on one social network is not guaranteed to succeed on another platform. Knowing what type of content performs best on each social platform, is a massive help in maximizing your visibility.
Social platforms have different approaches to what content is best and more relevant to users. What is more, these approaches aren’t exactly carved in stone, as social networks keep re-thinking user timelines.
Make it a habit, if not already, to keep an eye on social media’s ever-changing ranking algorithms. While you’re busy creating high-ranking videos, take the time to explore whatever content is currently ramping up on the platforms you feel you’re missing out on. More often than not, you can boost your organic reach by getting creative with already familiar content types.
How-to:
- Focus on user engagement. One thing remains unchanged in the world of ever-changing social media algorithms: likes, comments, and shares are still a sure-fire boost to your rankings.
- Tag, hashtag, and keep up with trends. The latter goes not only for hot topics to give momentum to your content but also for ranking algorithms as such. Make sure you follow social media on social media (I know) to stay in the know of what’s changing.
6. Embrace privacy
Social media is a tricky environment. As much as it offers a platform for building bridges and relationships, it also becomes a place of polarization and hostility. Against continuous allegations of user data exposure and privacy violations, people are going private, and so are brands.
With privacy as the running theme of post-2020 social media, make sure you follow the trend and go more private as well. By limiting your reach and sharing more exclusive content, you foster user engagement from the very start, as it takes an invite to become a part of the discussion.
SEO PowerSuite private user group on Facebook
A neat way to embrace privacy is by engaging with your customers through DMs. If your resources allow, favor human communication to messenger bots so that to minimize the automated feel of branded messaging.
How-to:
- Start private groups and communities. Be it a private group on Facebook or a ‘Close Friends’ list on Instagram, make your customers feel safer by creating private environments for brand outreach.
- DM your customers. Answer questions, respond to Stories, DM whenever you can. When done professionally, direct messaging allows for a personalized approach and great customer retention.
7. Expand to new platforms
There are very few newcomers on the social media scene, and even fewer of them show enough marketing potential to be added to your daily list of concerns. Still, every once in a while there appears a cool new thing that unlocks a pool of new audience segments.
Think TikTok. The platform is booming even with boomers (pardon my word choice), as more and more well-established brands are entering the TikTok game. Shout out to The Washington Post and other big names set to conquer the new thing.
Another newcomer to look out for is Byte, aka ‘the second coming of Vine’, which means a cooler feature set with all of the fun of its beloved forefather. It’s too soon to say how big of a hit Byte will be eventually, but it’s been proclaimed TikTok’s challenger as #1 free download on App Store.
How-to:
- Set up a TikTok account. It doesn’t matter much how serious of a brand you are. As soon as you have resources for one more social platform, make sure you get the most of it.
- Navigate the terrain. Try to post consistently and see what works best, while keeping an eye on Byte and every other prospective newcomer, one thing at a time.
Recap
As important as it is to set data-informed goals, it’s equally important to act on them daily, with clear objectives in mind. Social media marketing is no different: make sure you know where you’re going and how to get there.
I hope this checklist will inspire you to take a fresh look at your social media goals. Let me know how many points cross-check, and how ambitious your social media marketing is in 2020 and beyond.
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