Defining Goals To Help You Achieve Social Media Success

By now many companies and individuals have heard the buzz around social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and are wondering how using social networking sites such as these can help their businesses and brands grow.

Still other companies and individuals have tested the social media waters by setting up a Twitter account or a Facebook fan page; tweeted or posted an update or two and dismissed the whole thing as a waste of their time.

Lastly, we have those companies and individuals who have dived right into the social networking pool and have signed up for an account on every social networking site they can find. They typically move from social networking site to social networking site posting the odd status update on each of the different sites and generally lack a focus as to what they are trying to accomplish.

In order to be successful using the social media sites you can’t be a bystander wondering how they work, nor can you post a single update and never use it again and it’s probably not the best idea to sign up to every single site and hope that something sticks.

If your brand wishes to be successful in using the many social media tools freely available you need to not only research the tools that are available for you to use, but you also need to set goals for what you wish to accomplish when using social networking and social media.

Here are a few of the things I would coach individuals, business and brands on if they looking to discover if the use of social networks were right for them or if I was working with a company who was trying to refocus their energy into making their current social media campaigns successful:

1. Research – Start by researching the different social networks that are available for you to use, making sure not to limit yourself to only Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. There are literally hundreds of other sites out there including: Bebo, Friendster, Orkut, LinkedIn and many others.
   Your research should include what types of sites there are, what type of content is allowed to be posted and shared (images, video, text), the different ways you interact with the site (web only or is there a third party tool you can use), how active the community is and if your users are currently using that particular social networking site.
   Your research may uncover that although the community is large and very active the people you are targeting aren’t currently using that site (so neither should you at the moment) or you may find a small niche community full of the users you are trying to attract to your brand.
2. Time – Many people foolishly assume that social media will be a quick fix to whatever their marketing/branding problems may be. What they don’t realize is that in actuality there is a great amount of time, dedication and participation required in order to make social media successful for any brand.
   Some of the questions you need to ask concerning your time and availability should include:
   • How much time do you have to spend posting status updates, uploading videos, taking and sharing pictures and tweeting?
   • Will you be the person solely responsible for your social networking efforts?
   • Will you hire an additional employee to cover the social media tasks?
   • Will a team be in charge of the social media?
3. Goals – Just like in life, in order to be successful in social media you need to set goals. Without goals in place your social media efforts will most certainly not be effective and you will not only be wasting your time but the time of the users you are trying to attract to the brand as well. Having set and defined goals in place will also help you to analyze and track the effectiveness of your social media campaigns.
   Some of the goals you could set for your social media efforts include:
   • Attracting X number of fans or followers
   • Increasing brand recognition
   • Distributing coupons/discounts on products and seeing a certain percentage of them used during purchase
   • Attract new employees to the company
   • Solicit product ideas

There is an infinite amount of goals you could set for your brand or business and it will be up to you to decide which goals are appropriate for you and your brand. Keep in mind that you must be able to either measure or track your goals to see if your efforts were indeed successful. The ability to track and measure the success of your defined goals is extremely important as it will help determine if the message your brand put forth was on target or if you need to improve and refocus your message to further increase the successfulness of your social media branding efforts.

Social media and social networking can be some of the best tools available when trying to establish a brand or when trying to breathe new life into an older established brand. It can provide a way to reach your customers, provide a platform to improve your products or it could be used to help sell your products but don’t expect any or all of this to happen overnight.

In order to be successful with social media you and your brand must be willing to put in the time, dedication and research needed to grow a community and you must set measurable goals to track and define your success.

If you are missing out on any of these parts you and your brand may still achieve success within social media but because you haven’t defined, measured and tracked any goals you may never know it.