How To Set Social Media Goals And Set Your Shorts On Fire

I write about taking action and getting juiced with your social media accounts a lot on my business is fitness and it's all good and well to wake up in the morning fired up to write an awesome new post or send out a killer tweet or facebook update; but without specific goal setting and targets how will you ever know if you're developing your brand or just spamming the net?

In yesterdays post about Christmas promotion ideas, I suggested running a themed set of posts and updates over the next few weeks on a certain topic i.e Christmas, with the goal of sparking interest from your readers and essentially building the foundation for your next marketing campaign.

Today I want to discuss how to make those posts, tweets, updates etc. measurable goals that you can use this year and next to fine tune and add to your fire of consistency.

The Fire Of Consistency

Being consistent with social media is hard work. Consistent isn't exciting or brash or extreme, but it is the backbone of social media and one of the most important aspects to any successful account; along with quality content and active marketing.

The fight is won or lost far away from witnesses - behind the lines, in the gym, and out there on the road, long before I dance under those lights. - Muhammad Ali

If consistency is good enough for Muhammad Ali it's definitely good enough for you and I.

My business is fitness has become quite successful in a relatively short period of time and for the first few months, my goal was to simply fill it with content (I wanted 100 posts before I took it to market) and see what happened. In hindsight, that isn't much of a strategy and if one of my clients told me that was their strategy, I'd grab them by the shorts and tell them to set some targets!

So last month I sat down with my trusty magic marker and sheet of cardboard and wrote down some numbers and then transferred that info to a spreadsheet (see below).

(Click To Enlarge)This Chart Is Available To Download as a PDF Under The 'Downloads' Tab

What I found worked best was to put my one year targets in first (at the end) and then calculate backwards what numbers I would need monthly to achieve those targets.

Now that I had these numbers down, I went over my analytics and realised what kind of daily figures I was achieving and what I would need to achieve daily/weekly to hit them.

Right away, I felt like I had a purpose. Every post, link and piece of marketing would have to be 'strategised'. If it was coming close to the end of the day, I'd have to send out another tweet or update to try and drive some traffic onto the blog or my other accounts to make sure I met my daily targets.

All of a sudden; consistency had become exciting!

Now that I had these targets in place, I would consider my posts, tweets and updates in a different way.

For a personal trainer or fitness professional, you may now look at a certain facebook update and notice how many people like it or commented. If no one jumped on board, then perhaps try a different angle. At the same time, if your subscribers or Likes list is building off the back of it, then perhaps it was a good update, it's just that people didn't feel like chatting.

Look Outside The Box
To date; the most popular post on my business is fitness is an interview I had with personal trainer Ellena Tsatsos. It's had the most page views of any other article, was liked around Facebook and people responded well on Twitter, yet it doesn't have one comment. However, my subscriber numbers spiked that day. So my conclusion is that comments are not a true indicator of growth or article popularity.

Now that I have these goals in place, I feel like my accounts have more direction. I can sit down at the end of the day and see exactly what's going on and what worked and didn't work and if I need to do some last minute marketing.

I hope you enjoyed this post. Feel free to share it on Facebook and Twitter and as always, would love to hear your opinion in the comments section below.

Ben

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