Wondering why your social media isn’t working?

Let’s ask one question: What’s your objective?

Did your shoulders just come up? Yup, that’s usually the response I get from my clients when I ask this question. Most of my clients haven’t thought about WHAT EXACTLY they are trying to achieve by being on social media.

You may be wondering why you would need a social media plan or strategy? Fair enough, we are all busy and yet another piece of paper that we won’t ever read again is not going to be helpful. But…

Social media can be incredibly overwhelming when you are trying to juggle your blog, Facebook. Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Google + or whatever other platform you’re using.

This is where a strategy, or at least a plan, can be extremely helpful.

Having a clearly defined strategy sets out clear goals and objectives for using social media and the methods you will use to achieve your goals.

It’s like having a road map for the beautiful destination you’re going to visit next. The objective could be the final destination of shopping in Paris, your road map of how you’ll reach Paris is your strategy. It will include things such as ‘saving money’, ‘booking flights’, ‘booking hotels’, ‘researching shopping precincts’ etc. Your strategy tells you WHAT you need to do to get to your objective, which could be ‘customer service’, ‘brand awareness’, ‘sales’ or a bit of a mix.

To start creating a strategy, it’s good to split it up into a mission, your goals, and how you’ll do this.

• Your mission is really your overarching reason for why you are using social media. What is your main objective?

The main objective for [insert business name] is to create a larger social media following using Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to build brand awareness and to increase our newsletter database.

• Your goals are the things you want to do. Chop them up into bite sized chunks, so that they’re small achievable tasks. It is important to have goals that you can measure, so try to be specific in what you want to achieve. For example, “I want to increase my Facebook likes by 20% over the next two months.” It’s doable, and can be measured.

• Lastly, HOW are you going to do and measure this. These are the steps you will take to achieve your mission and goals. For example if your goal is to build awareness of your business, the way you do this may be to use Facebook to post the link to your website and new blog posts with a link such as bitly. The great thing about using short links like bitly, is that it will allow you to measure how many people are clicking on it. You can also use google analytics to measure your links, but you’ll need to read up on this and become familiar with google analytics.

Creating a strategy will pay off and will prevent you from endlessly spending time on social media without any results. If you have any questions about creating a social media strategy, I would love to help you. Maybe my 90 minute power session is what you’re looking for?

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