The 3 P’s of Social Media: Policy, Purpose, Planning (Part 2)

Guest post by @terryeva, a solutions architect and a social media enthusiast

The first article in this series discussed why organizations need a social media policy. Before engaging in social media, one must have a purpose.  Purpose, created before or after the social media policy, defines the reasons an organization is in the social media space. Purpose, or goals, provides a road-map to social media success. Without goals, organizations are wasting time, money, and resources.

The goals one sets must be specific and measurable. Examining the organization’s mission and value statements is a good place to start when one is writing social media goals.

Media organizations tend to make money from advertising or subscriptions so time spent on a page and number of unique users will be important. In the case of a product company, the number of items sold will be important. A service company may be concerned about customer support.

For an example: A media website, such as people.com, sells advertising as well as magazine subscriptions. Some reasonable goals are:

• Use Social Media to grow the unique visitors visiting people.com by X percentage year-over-year

• Use Social Media to increase external traffic to people.com by X percentage year-over-year

• Use Social Media to increase the time people spend on people.com by X percentage quarter-over-quarter

• Use Social Media to listen to and connect with consumers to positively impact sentiment year-over-year

• Conversion of X percentage of online readers to the magazine subscription year-over-year

• Conversion of X percentage of online readers to the newsletter subscription year-over-year

The key to writing goals is for the goals to be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely. Make the goals meaningful; force yourself to stretch to complete the goals. One may even add or remove goals from the list based on information found in the planning phase. If discovered that a goal is not reasonable or attainable when one starts engaging in social media, wisely revise the goal. Remember the goal is simply a road-map to success. One can reach the success destination in more than one way.

The social media policy and goals are completed. Yet, now is not the time to jump into social media. Why? The different social media platforms are not the same. The audience is different, the way the audiences engage is different, and the psycho-graphics are different. We must look before we leap!

My next blog post will discuss determining a plan for being in the social media space…

Photo Credit:  NASA