Imagine Your Reality

I’ve discussed determining your audience and their needs, as well as what business model you fit. In this post we focus on goals for using social media. When many businesses start to incorporate social media into their marketing they do so with a nebulous goal of getting business from it, without really defining what that will look like or what they will need to do, in order to get business from social media sites.

It’s important that you concisely and concretely define your goals for using social media. Getting business for example can obviously mean getting paying clients, but can also mean increased marketing visibility, finding power partners, and better customer service. Because those goals and others can fall under the nebulous phrase “getting business” its important to break that phrase down further and articulate goals that you’d like to achieve using social media that you can determine are being achieved.

You also need to determine if the goals are realistic to the technology being used. Raising more awareness of your  brand is a feasible goal with social media. Expecting that you will get ten clients from social media interaction is still feasible, but to a lesser degree. A realistic goal accounts for the limits of the technology, as well as the time commitment involved. And while ROI is important in determining if Social Media is something which is useful for business, realistically it’s a bad approach to take in justifying the use of social media, because it ignores the primary context of social media being a networking, communication, and brand platform, as opposed to a client conversion process.

The other issue to consider is how much time you are willing to put toward social media. As with anything else, the amount of time put into social media dictates to some degree the return on investment that one gets from it. Putting in only an hour a week doesn’t allow for enough time to effectively use social media. When putting together your strategy, you’ll need to ask yourself how much time to put toward social media and accordingly balance it with your other obligations.