Goals Goals Goals

Why are you bothering with this social media stuff?

If you're getting into this social media stuff you need to ask yourself why. The obvious answer is that you want to increase business. However, you might not see a noticeable difference after creating social media content for the first few months. Having a Facebook page or a Twitter feed might not increase sales 10% but does that mean your efforts are failing? 

I bring this up because you need to decide from the start what you're trying to accomplish in order to define how to succeed with this stuff. There might not be a noticeable bump in sales from creating a Facebook or Twitter community but you might be benefiting in other ways. You could be benefiting by creating brand awareness or an identity for your company.

There's no simple way to define social media success so you need to define what you're trying to accomplish right from the start. You need to set goals. 

For example, your goals might be to:

• increase Twitter followers
• increase Facebook fans
• create brand identity
• create a community for customers to discuss your product 
• increase traffic to your main website
• increase brand awareness

Let's be serious: overall your goal is going to be to increase sales. What I'm saying is that it might not be that easy to measure for the first few months and you don't want to give up too soon. You also don't want to put in too many hours either. By creating goals you can help focus your social media content and help measure your progress as you go along. 

My experience in social media so far is that building a following from scratch and seeing results is a slow process but that it does pay off. I'll give some real world examples in future posts...