The first thing every single business should think about before they embark on setting up a social media campaign is their goals and objectives.
So many people think that all they need to do is setup a facebook page and bang, they’ve got a social media campaign. Even if they spend $10k on getting a fancy facebook page setup though, without setting goals and objectives for their campaign, they’re not going to get much out of it. Every plan requires goals to give it a sense of direction. Without a clear vision of where you want to get to and what you want to achieve from your campaign, It’ll be unfocused and the results will be weak and disjointed. Remember your social media campaign is a part of your overall marketing campaign so make sure your social media goals and objectives are in line with your overall marketing goals, and don’t conflict.
Examples of Goals and objectives
What kind of goals and objectives should you have for your campaign? We’ll start with goals, some examples of goals you might have include:
- Building Brand Awareness
- Increasing sales
- Increase Traffic to you website
- Becoming a resource/authority
- Reputation Management
Setting SMART Objectives
Setting these will help you reach your goals – now I generally try to lay off the acronyms, however this is a pretty important one; any objective you set should be SMART.
S – specific; your objective should be well defined and focussed. Be very clear on exactly what you want to see happen.
M – measurable; you should be able to track and analyse the results of your objective
A – attainable; you’re objective shouldn’t be impossible, but at the same time it shouldn’t be too easy either. You’re objective should make you stretch, but not to the point that it’s impossible.
R – realistic; make sure you’re objective is realistic, for example do you have the time and resources that will be needed to achieve it?
T – time bound; everything should be tied down with a date, this will help provide a sense of urgency to achieve the goal and also provide motivation.
Here’s an example of a simple SMART goal: Increase website traffic by 25% by posting social media content by January 1, 2012
This objective is specific, we’ve said we want to increase website traffic by 25%, it’s also measurable as we can use analytics to measure how much website traffic goes up by. It’s attainable, and realistic, since there’s plenty of people not viewing our site already – and we have the resources in place to start posting content. And last but not least it’s time bound, we’ve given ourselves til January 1 2012 to achieve it.
By setting goals for your social media campaign, you’ll have taken the first steps that thousands of businesses fail to take before they start using social media. Now that you’re armed with your goals, and have a clear idea what you want to achieve; you can move on to creating a strategy.
Do you have goals and objectives for your social media campaign?
