Why are you doing Social Media – part 1
Social Media Objectives and Planning
Are you ‘doing’ Social Media because everybody else is ‘doing’ Social Media. That’s fine on a personal level, but when in business there needs to be some specific and measurable actions using the right strategies to achieve some well-defined outcomes.
Think about business Social Media the same way as you would about a weight lose plan. Start with the end in mind. For our weight lose example we start by making a plan and writing it out. E.g.
- How much weight do I want to lose?
- How many times per week do I need to go to the gym to obtain my weight lose goals?
- What specific exercises do I need to do?
- What do I need to eat to support my weight lose goals?
- What tools, resources and people do I need to help me achieve my goals?
We monitor and adjust our exercise program and diet based on the daily, weekly and monthly results we wish to obtain. It’s the same with Social Media.
Let’s look at what your Social Media objectives might be:
- To Increase brand awareness
- To Increase credibility or expert status in your industry
- To generate lead generation through subscriptions or acquiring emails or contact details
- To Increase the number of likes, followers etc.? (outreach)
- To Increase the number of retweets, shares or comments? (gaining expert status)
- To Increase the number of visitors that you drive offline?
- To Increase the number of visitors that you drive to your website? (to a dedicated squeeze page or landing page that has a single purpose)
- To Increase the number of visitors that fill out a form or provide an email address? (nurture campaign)
- To Increase number of subscribers (membership site or trial)
- To further your search engine optimisation improvements (Google monitors your ‘social signals’ and gives you credit, where it is earned)
The very act of writing down your objectives will get you focused on achieving them. The more specific you are, the better. Make them SMART goals where possible (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely).
One example of a focused Twitter objective could be:
“We want to increase our Twitter followers by 50 per month by tweeting industry specific news five times a week to new groups and lists of our ideal prospects which we will obtain by researching various user forums and LinkedIn groups which we will sign up to.”
Good luck!
