Are you seeing the results you hoped for from your social media marketing efforts?
Are you having trouble measuring your social marketing ROI (return on investment)?
In this article I’ll explain why so many people answer “no” the questions above and strategies you can take to avoid this frustration.
Set Your Goals
One of the first questions I ask clients is “what are your social media goals?” and “what are your objectives?”
Most of the time the answers I get are “I don’t know” or “we haven’t thought about it.”
Many people are so focused on just doing social that they forget to think strategically about why they are doing social.
Without setting goals for what you want to achieve you have a limited number of opportunities to measure how effective your strategies are. I find many people are strictly focused on how many fans and followers they have. Fan and followers to your various social accounts are important but numbers alone are not the most important goal you should be focused on.
If I could get you 10,000 fans to your page that might make you happy. But if I told you they were all located in the Philippines, Russia or India while your target market was Toronto, Canada that would not help you at all. You’re not likely to get any sales generated from this market if you sell real estate in Toronto as an example.
One of most important goals you should have is to attract a fan base that’s interested in your products or services, in your target market and who are willing and able to engage with you.
So here again is the most important question that I suggest you focus on: what are your social media marketing goals for the next 30 days?
Think about what you want to accomplish. Be specific.
Here are some additional questions that can assist you in setting specific and measurable goals for your social media initiatives:
Do you want to attract a certain amount of new fans? How many did you attract last month? How many will you attract this month?
Do you want to increase the amount of likes, comments and shares to your various posts? How many on average per post? What can you do to encourage fans and followers to engage with you?
Do you want to collect email addresses from a promotional campaign you are running? How many email addresses will you collect this month?
Do you want to attract web site traffic? How much traffic came from your social accounts last month? How much do you want to achieve this month?
Do you want to attract sales for a specific promotion you are running? How are you going to track sales from social specifically?
Are you trying to build engagement on a specific social platform? If yes, what are you going to do to attract more users to that account?
These are just some questions that I commonly ask my clients to help establish specific measurable 30 day goals. There are many different components to consider with your social marketing efforts. It’s key to think about what’s most important based on other marketing initiatives you may have for your organization.
Once you have your goals set you can next look at what you can do to help achieve these goals. You can also start to consider how your post calendar needs to include focused content and topics to help you meet or exceed your goals.
Once you have your goals, strategy and content calendar organized, you’ll have something to track over the next 30 days. You can then review and evaluate what strategies worked and what changes you need to make in the next 30 days.
If setting goals and tracking results is something you struggle with I’d recommend considering contacting a social media expert. Look for someone who is able to understand your business and able to work with you one-one-one or in a group setting to help you in setting realistic goals and also strategize ways to meet those goals.
Even if you do set your own 30 day social goals, I hope this blog post has helped you consider other components of your strategy that you may want to focus on. If you have specific strategies that have worked for your organization, I’d be happy to hear your ideas in the comment section.