You've heard the mantra: a social media strategy should start with clear goals. What makes a goal "clear," though? How do you ensure your social media goals are appropriate?
As I mentioned in my post "Six Steps to a Social Media Strategy," every strategy should start with business goals. Because they are the foundation on which the strategy is built, it's important to get them right. Here are a few guidelines I follow to make sure my clients' goals are solid.
1. Make them business goals, not social media goals.
Ultimately, you are investing in social media in order to help further your business-likekly to improve the bottom line one way or another. Even goals such as improving the quality of support or encouraging customer loyalty are ultimately about the bottom line.
To be sure your social media goals are about the business, write them so that an executive reading them will:
- Know exactly what you mean-Reviewers in your company should understand the goal on first read.
- See the cost-savings, revenue generation, or strategic alignment of this goal-If it isn't obvious to executives how this goal will save money, make money, or support strategic objectives, try again.
- Not know that this is an online goal-This may seem contrary, but when someone is reading your social media goal, ideally, they shouldn't be able to tell it has anything to do with social media or even the internet. Following this guideline forces you to write goals that are high-level and business-focused, rather than a narrower online goal that might not have a strong business outcome.
2. Make your goals succinct and action-oriented
Write each goal as a one-line sentence fragment that starts with a verb. For example:
- Drive new registrations
- Get partners to regularly provide end-user technical content
- Increase event registrations
Keeping it to one line ensures the goal is crisp and focused. Starting with a verb ensures the goal really is a goal: it's about achieving something, getting somewhere.
If you are having trouble getting your goal to one, action-oriented line, it probably means that your goal is too fuzzy or not granular enough. You haven't thought your objectives through well enough and you need to get clear on exactly what you are trying to achieve. Or the goal you've written actually contains more than one goal, and you need to separate them.
3. Make your goals specific and measurable
The next step after developing your social media goals is to define success criteria. I believe success criteria is absolutely required, for the reasons I'll outline in my upcoming series "The Power of Success Criteria." The only way to create success criteria is to start with a goal that is specific and measurable.
You should be able to look at each goal and come up with ways to validate that the goal was achieved. For example, if your objective is Drive new registrations, you'll want to measure the number of new registrations and where they came from. If your goal is to Get partners to regularly provide end-user technical content, you'll be able to see the content that partners are providing and how often. As you write your goal, think ahead far enough to know that you can define success criteria for them.
If your goals are business-focused, succinct and action-oriented, and allow you to create measurable success criteria, they are reasonable and well-focused social media objectives.