Do you have well defined goals for your social media use? You can use any social media tools without goals, but without goals, you can’t be sure you are spending your time productively. Here’s information about how to define goals and objectives that you can use to drive your social media efforts and improve your business.

• Before You Start: You are using social media for your business. Or, you are ready to start using social media for your business.
• Learning level: 1 | Social Media Basics
• Article Last Updated: Sunday, December 4, 2011

Business Goals For Social Media

Before you invest one more hour of your time into using social media, take a few minutes to get clear about your social media goals. Your goals are the reasons why you use social media and every activity should support your goals. Your goals should be specific, measurable, and relevant to your business performance.

An example goal: Have a large online community.

This isn’t a great goal because just having a large number of followers doesn’t guarantee that they are customers or potential customers for your business. Instead, create goals more like these:

• Engage my existing and potential customers online to get their feedback and experiences with my business.
• Share timely information about my products/services with my online community to encourage them to continue using my products/services.
• Find potential customers for my business.

These are much better goals because they are relevant to your business performance. And yet, even these goals can be improved. These goals are not specific and measurable. There’s no real way to measure how successfully you have met these goals.

Defining Business Objectives

When you have a solid business goal, you need to break it out into specific and measurable objectives. Many businesses may have similar goals, but the way you break them down reflects your unique business challenges and situation. To define an objective that is specific and measurable, you add:

• Strategy. What action will you take to meet these objectives?
• Relevant numbers. Any numbers that let you measure quantity and quality.
• Dates. Your time frame for completing your strategy.

Your objectives are important. They drive your actions on social media. They also give you a way to measure you success with social media.

Often, you will have a different set of objectives for each slice of your online community. For example, you may have different objectives for existing customers and potential customers. Sometimes, you will have different objectives for each social media tool, and other times, you can use the same objectives for several tools.

Your business goals and objectives come from your business and how you measure your business success. They help you to customize your social media experience to meet your specific business challenges. Invest a little time to make sure your business gets the most benefit from your social media investment.

Your turn: What did you learn when you defined your business goals and objectives for social media? How did it change your online behavior? Share your experience with the community.

Related Articles:

• Setting Twitter Goals
• Using Your Twitter Goals
• Twitter Conversation Checklist
• Social Media Communications Audit
• Talk About Your Business (Part 1)
• Splashing In The Social Media Swimming Pool
• What Do You Expect From Social Media?
• Customers With Benefits
• Why Do You Use Social Media?