Without a compass, a ship is lost.
Social media can suck you into a time wasting spiral if you do not navigate toward a specific destination. It is easy to get sidetracked in the distraction heavy world of Youtube and Twitter and Facebook.
Every business knows to set clear goals, and it is no exception.
2 Goal Types
There are two sets of goals you need in place in social media, your navigation goals and your destination goals. Your navigation goals are the answers to the question “How will social media help our business?” Your destination goals are the real impacts of those strategy answers.
Let’s connect the dots here, your navigation goals get you to your destination goals.
Say your answer to the question above is “social media will help our business by getting more visits to our online store.” Your destination goal is REALLY to sell more stuff. More website visits increases sales which increases revenue.
1. Destination Goals
To borrow a line of thought from Rich Ullman of Ripple6, at the end of the day, your social media activity should be doing one of three things:
- Increase Revenue
- Decrease Cost
- Positive Effect on Brand Value
Those are your destination goals. Those are the things that your boss or the CEO or your accountant will listen to. To get there you need strategy of course. You need a clear point on the horizon to set your sites on.
2. Navigation Goals
A few sound social media navigation goals:
- Respond to customer service complaints faster
- Build a more vocal and involved online community
- Drive more traffic to our online store
- Establish our executive teams as thought leaders in our industry
- Build a large audience on Facebook to help launch future campaigns
- Establish a strong network of blogger relationships to support PR efforts
- Increase use of LinkedIn for better HR results
- Utilize a wiki and Youtube for more successful training efforts
- Create a fun and creative blog that will attract and hold the attention of our stakeholders
These goals will give a business clear direction when they invest time and money in social media. And if you have tied them to your real destination goals effectively then you will have buy in and a clear path to results.
These are simple steps, but necessary ones for any business to think through when investing in social media.