Your social media program should have clear objectives

Digital Chameleon Blog

Your social media program should have clear objectives

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

I'm sharing my latest column for Beauty Directory with you here -

Nielsen‘s Social Media Marketing Study (June 2010) found that Australian business is no longer asking “why?” social media, but the question today is “how?” Over the past three years, social networks and forums have made large inroads into the dominance of Search.

In fact, according to Experion Hitwise, Facebook is the number two site behind Google in Australia; Facebook also ranks second in the US, UK and NZ; and is the leading website in Canada. In Australia 71% of companies surveyed by Nielsen planned to participate in social media (up from 40% in 2009).

However, most are approaching it in an unstructured way. It’s as though some marketers have a blind spot around “social,” and don’t consider it with the same rigor as they do other media and marketing channels. This is understandable due to the hype surrounding social media, as well as the fact that it is so contrary to the “push” marketing methods we’re so familiar with.

This new “pull” world can be very daunting, but should be held as accountable as any other channel where you spend money. I was at a conference last year where someone naively asked a panel including marketing people from Microsoft and Epson why they’d bother to track ROI on social media programs.

The answers were unequivocal – it was marketing spend and had to be approved based on business objectives and return just like any other marketing expenditure. If some of it was “free” (i.e. no media costs involved) there were still internal resource costs to consider. Granted Microsoft and Epson aren’t your average companies, but the point is that a social media strategy is more than putting up a branded Facebook page and ticking a box. You have to have a business reason for building that page, as well as a plan for how to use it.

Last month I mentioned the steps in planning a social media campaign. Let’s look at the first step in some more detail - setting clear and measurable objectives.

Are you clear why you’re planning a social media program? Is it for customer service, marketing or PR, product support or development, sales, grassroots marketing? Market research? Will it help your SEO efforts by building inbound links? Is there another problem you’re trying to solve? As you know, any successful media plan begins by setting the marketing or business objectives. A social media plan is no different and can achieve broad objectives such as building brand awareness, creating advocacy, or generating customer loyalty. It can also drive tactical objectives such as driving traffic, supporting a new product launch, or increasing conversations with your customers.

Once you’re clear on why you’re considering a social media program, you can then think about what metrics will matter to you. You don’t want to look at brand metrics when your objective was product development. Remember that clear goals will drive successful measurement – you’ll be measuring the right things to determine whether or not the program was successful. So your homework is to really think about the objectives for your social media campaign, with a view to what results you’ll need to measure. Next time, we’ll look at the second step in planning a social media campaign – understanding your audience.