How Google Stays SMART using Social Media
Google is an American multinational technology company that specializes in Internet-related services and products, which include online advertising technologies, a search engine, cloud computing, software, and hardware.
Although Google is known to assist many company’s with their own analytics and making sure they meet their social media objectives and goals, Google has their own set of objectives, goals and KPI’s.
Company Objectives
Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Its vision statement is to “provide an important service to the world-instantly delivering relevant information on virtually any topic.” In 2019, Sundar Pichai, Google CEO, emphasized a renewed mission to allow people “to get things done” (Cuofano, 2020).
SMART Goals
SMART goals are established using a specific set of criteria that ensures your goals are attainable. SMART is an acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound.
When writing a SMART goal, you work through each of those terms to build a goal that shares exactly what needs to be accomplished, when it needs to be accomplished by, and how you’ll know when you’re successful (Boogaard, 2019).
Some SMART goals for Google, that focus on their social media efforts are:
- To increase the amount of clicks by X% on lead generating posts or links.
- Increase the number of mentions and replies by X.
- Increase the number of engagements per post by X.
- Increase average response time to X.
Each of these goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and can be changed to fit a certain time frame that the goal is being analyzed during. The X is there to represent that it can change and Google will be able to insert that number based on what they are looking for.
Goals always need to be measured and with that Google can develop a set of KPI’s that will allow them to analyze their social media efforts.
Googles KPI’s
After reviewing the SMART goals above, there are a couple of KPI’s Google can take in to account when reviewing and seeing what worked and what didn’t.
Google Analytics has an amazing tool for mapping lead generation, which is the easiest way to see if the 1. SMART goal is performing well.
After Google runs their social media campaigns or releases a new product, an effective KPI would be reviewing hashtags, mentions and tags to see how many people are talking about Google and what social media platforms the most conversation is happening on.
Google can also track engagement on each of their social media posts by using their respective social platforms insights.
Lastly, Google would also be able to use their social media platform insights to take a look at the response times that each platform is meeting.
How Social Media Can Help Google
Google is mostly known for being the top search engine, but Google has also released many features, softwares and technology products. With all that Google does, they constantly need to make the effort to market themselves and their products. Over the past couple of years, Google’s marketing and social media efforts have definitely not gone unnoticed.
The Marketing team at Google has continued to work on campaigns and develop their social media strategy. Meghan Biron, Global Media Technologies Manager at Google says, “Our team also integrates technology along the way. Google Marketing Platform solutions allow us to develop dynamic creative, capable of adapting to myriad audience segments. This approach allows us to scale creative efficiently, so that global teams can build on prior successes.”
Technology, insights, and creative are the pillars of every campaign. And bringing those three elements together delivers powerful results (Biron, 2017).
Google released the “Loretta” campaign during the 2020 Super Bowl. The short video clipped showed a man reminiscing about the love of his life with a little help from Google. This evoked so much emotion from many viewers and followers. This video was shared all over social media and was definitely one of the top campaigns released during this time.
“Google’s Loretta ad scored high among a panel of 65 MBA students at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. Using a strategic framework to evaluate ads on their effectiveness in strategic brand-building, the ad ranked well for branding and messaging” (Rucker, 2020).
The Outcome of Google’s Social Media Efforts
Using ads like this, as well as using their social media platform to talk about real events going on has been beneficial for Google. Although Google is technology focused, their social media, marketing ad efforts have been catered to evoking emotion and relating to people around the world. Not only is Google using their platforms to sell themselves and promote their products, they are also using their social platforms to build connections with users, which has proven to be helpful to their business.
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