What are your social media strategies? To be able to set achievable goals for your social media marketing efforts is very important. This ensures that you’re not wasting money, time and other resources hitting your head up against a brick wall. It’s crucial to test and measure each marketing strategy, and this includes social media. If you lose sight of the point of social media in terms of using it to promote your business efforts, you could also lose track of the amount of time you’re spending using it. And let’s be honest, admit it that sometimes the time you’re spending on social media is just messing around.
For you to be able to set goals you have to know your social media strategies… what your goal is and to be able to write this down. A goal is something like — “Increase sales by 10% in 30 days.” With this goal as an example, you’ll be forced to develop and discover ways to make sure that you get to achieve any goal you make. That is where testing and evaluating metrics comes in. First you make the goal, then you decide how you can achieve the goal (tactics), and then you test and evaluate it (metrics).
The steps look like this:
- Determine Goals
- Determine Tactics
- Perform Tactics
- Study Metrics
- Repeat
It is important to remember that you can’t achieve what you don’t name and plan. This means if you have no idea where you’re headed, then how can you create a map to get to your destination? If you’re not quantifying your efforts, it is impossible to ever know if you’re achieving anything. One of the main reasons of business failure has to do with not having a plan, not following the plan, and not tracking metrics to ensure that the plan is working and the goals are achievable.
Determine Goals
Achievable goals should be small, short term goals. In order to come up with short-term goals, you create a long term goal then break it down to manageable chunks. For example, if you want to increase traffic to your blog by 100% in one year, you’d need to figure out what your traffic is today, and what your traffic growth needs to be each month to achieve a 100 percent growth in one year.
Determine Tactics
Because you now know your goals and you’ve already named them, the next thing to do is to act on them. What should you do in order to achieve your goals? Actions may involve using social media more strategically like creating a social media calendar and then sticking to your plan. Your social media calendar could look like this:
(10:05 am, 4:15 pm and 9:00 pm) Monday through Friday — Auto sharing of new blog posts each day (posts which were either written by a ghostwriter, or yourself from a publication calendar)
(8:20 am, 1:30 pm, and 6:00 pm)Monday – Wednesday -Friday — Re-Tweet useful information to my followers
(11:30 am, 3:05 pm, and 11:00pm )Tuesday & Thursday — Introduce or hint about new products (you can do this via blogging as well if you have everything set up to be automatic)
8am each day spend 10 minutes answering direct messages personally
Post 2 articles a week to article marketing sites, share said articles with social media
After you write it down, you then really have to do it, or delegate it, whatever you do, it has to be done. You can’t succeed in any plan without carrying out the steps no matter how hard you wish it or think about it. Remember, success takes action.
Study Metrics
Before you start any new campaign, check your current metrics using whatever system you like such as Google Analytics. Then, pick a specific time each week or month to look at your data again. You can keep track in a spreadsheet to put it all together in one spot. Track subscriber rates, new comments, visitors, and even by how many people re-tweet and / or share your information. Hint: Use Google Docs and hire a VA to keep track of this for you.
Social Media Strategies Takeaway
If the strategies and tactics that you used worked well for you and you’re satisfied with the results, then by all means repeat them. If you want to ramp something up, or change a strategy, change only one tactic or even just part of a tactic at a time. By doing this you can really measure and test how that one change affects your future results.
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