As companies spend more time embracing social media, there’s a lot of focus on strategic and tactics – what services should be used, who should manage them, and what’s the return on investment.
Another important issue that shouldn’t be overlooked is establishing social media goals so the time, energy and money invested on social media can be deemed to be successful or not. Without pre-established benchmarks, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to get a handle on whether the desired goals and objectives have been achieved, and whether strategic or tactical changes should be made.
The challenge is defining your social media goals given that companies may have different targets. These goals can include higher sales, a stronger brand, happier customers, better customer service, increased Web site traffic, lots of followers on Facebook and Twitter, and improved search engine optimization. Companies need to select the most important goals, and then track them.
This may seem like a straightforward exercise with some pretty obvious metrics but, nevertheless, goals are a crucial part of a social media program. To ignore goals would be a terrible mistake.
Tags: goals, objectives, ROI, Social Media
