Are you incorporating micro goals into your social media campaign? Most people concentrate on the big goals such as the number of followers and fans but leave out the smaller goals of how many people are retweeting them and how many times a discount code was used on a social media outlet.

As Jennifer Evans Laycock, the President of SugarSpun Marketing explains, micro goals are essential because they allow you to see the progress of your bigger goals.

“It’s having those micro goals in play to give you a way to see the overall campaign,” she said.

Micro goals also make it easier to change directions in your social campaign. For example, you might find that something isn’t working as well as you had originally thought it would. Interestingly, micro goals give you more liberty to make adjustments because you are not focusing solely on the end goal.

“You’re actually seeing it as it’s happening,” said Laycock.

Incidentally, both micro goals and primary goals need to be in place before the campaign is executed. More often than not, businesses jump on board with a Facebook page or a Twitter account simply because “everybody else is doing it.” This, however, is a problem when these tools cannot be linked back to your bottom line.

In order to really see value in your social media campaign, Laycock points out that you need to establish goals and micro goals and then determine which tools will best help you meet those goals.