How to Create a Quarterly Review of Your Business

 

Let’s Review What Happened

If you want to continue to grow your business or blog this year, the first step you need to do is to review what happened during the last few months. It’s like I always say, “How do you know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been?”

Reviewing your social sites for the past quarter is more than just writing out the number of followers you gained { or worse, lost! } every month.

It’s more about understanding why you’re spending your valuable time in your social sites. It’s about learning how posting in a Facebook group or pinning your content on Pinterest helped you grow your business or blog.

Social Media Review:

Let’s just get this out of the way – you know you want to do this so go ahead and get out a piece of paper or pull up a Google doc. Go through all your social sites and write out all your fan or follower numbers.

These initial follower and fan numbers are great to use as a baseline to remind yourself where you are right now.

Now that you’ve got the number thing out of your system, it’s time to dig a little deeper and review what really happened with your social sites.

Let’s work through the Deep Dive Social Media Quarterly Review Worksheets. You can download a copy below to help you start doing a deep dive review into your social media marketing.

 

Before we jump into the Social Media Quarterly Review process, I want to share a few things for you to keep in mind while you’re answering these questions to review what happened in the past quarter:

1. You should always set goals! I’m not just talking about the number of people following you but goals that will actively help you grow your business or blog. These are the numbers that you’ll be using to check your progress and to see what’s not working.

2. Make sure you create some kind of system to track your progress. It could be monitoring your Google Analytics { this is what I use every month } or tracking the internal analytics for each of your social sites.

3. Don’t make your tracking system complicated. I review my analytics and add in the numbers into an Evernote notebook. This way, I can look back through all the notes in that notebook to see what’s working and what needs tweaking. Your tracking system should be that easy.

4. Pay attention to what you’re monitoring { don’t just check the numbers and walk away } and adjust your goals to ensure that all the work you’re doing is helping you grow your business. Your business will shift and change as the year goes on so holding on to goals that no longer benefit your business will just weigh you down.

Let the goals that aren’t on track for you go folks … I’m giving you permission to just let it go.

In the Deep Dive Social Media Quarterly Review, you’ll work through the review process and answer some questions about your social media marketing. 

To show you how to work through these questions, I’m going to share with you my answers about how I filled out the Quarterly Review worksheets:

What felt good with your social sites over these past 3 months? Which sites have connected you to more customers?

The two sites that clicked for me were Facebook Groups and LinkedIn.

I’ve continued to connect and create more meaningful relationship in my Facebook groups. And it wasn’t just because I showed up to answer questions in the groups. I took the extra step and connected with many of my connections with a Zoom call.

I met new people and heard about all the cool things that they do to help their customers. I grew my community and hopefully over time, I’ll turn those connections into clients.

My other feel good social site was LinkedIn.

I started scheduling posts to share content to my LinkedIn connections. I went into the site every week to Like other’s posts and comment on the content that they shared. I spent my time actually being social!

Right now, LinkedIn feels like everything that I wanted my Facebook business page to be. LinkedIn is all about business – what you’re selling, what you’re working on, what you do to help others.

No one cares what you ate for breakfast in LinkedIn and right now, this feels good about the place where I want to be to grow my business.

 

Which social site was time well spent and brought you the most web site traffic and/or sales?

Pinterest has always been my top referral site and the first three months of the year just reminded me of the power of this visual site.

To be honest, my traffic numbers went up and down and it was directly related to the amount of time that I spent on Pinterest pinning. And as the person who created the Pinterest Process workbook { and developed the 15 minute pinning process }, I have no excuse to NOT be on that site.

At this point, I’m taking a good look at my schedule and how much I can get done. With the increase in the Discover Your Strategy calls that I’m doing every week, this review helped me to see that it’s time for me to rework my current routine to make sure that I’m including the actions that I need to do to grow my business.

 

What was your biggest challenge with your social sites?

With all the changes going on with Facebook this year, I’m completely challenged with what to do with my Facebook business page.

Right now it feels like I use my business page as an online business card — when people first meet me, they look me up on Facebook so it’s hard for me to let the whole thing go.

I get it. The struggle is real with me too folks.

Without spending any money on Facebook ads, the chances that my business page posts are low to none of showing up in anyone’s newsfeed. And I consistently spent money on Facebook last year and got very little site traffic or saw an increase in my email list so at this time, paying for more ads doesn’t feel like an option.

I already felt challenged with my time and I decided to pull back on how often I would focus on my Facebook business page.

 

How did you handle your challenges?

My biggest challenge was being consistent. Because my Facebook business page wasn’t really working, I didn’t make it a priority and would go weeks without posting anything. Or I would use that time to schedule my posts on LinkedIn.

I tried to plan out my Facebook posts and set aside the time to create my content but mostly, I just learned to put my expectations in check. I accepted the fact that if I had to the time to do the Facebook posts, then I would. And if I couldn’t get it to the Facebook posts, I wasn’t going to stress over it.

 

What could you have done better to deal with your challenges?

I needed to put my expectations in check about my Facebook business page.

I’m so on the fence  about whether doing all this work is going to help me to grow my business. I’ve followed other coaches and watched how successful they were and I got caught up in the idea that I could make this work. I could have done a better job of accepting my schedule for what it was and I wasn’t going to always find time to post on my Facebook business page.

 

What do you want to see happen in your social sites next quarter?

My Pinterest Strategy Facebook group continuing to grow.

Last year, I made some big changes to the group to encourage more engagement and it’s been pretty awesome to see our Pinterest group turn into a community where we help each other learn, grow and support each other’s business or blog.

I’d love to make stronger connections with the members in my Pinterest group, get on Connection Calls with them and learn how I can help them grow their businesses or blogs using Pinterest.

 

Setting Social Media Goals

Now that you’ve downloaded the Deep Dive Social Media Quarterly Review and worked the questions to see what happened with your social sites, it’s time to set some goals.

When you did your review, what seemed to be a consistent pattern? Did you struggle to find time to post or schedule to your sites? Was your engagement down because you didn’t know what content to post?

Think about your biggest challenge with your social sites and we’ll use this information to help you create your social media goals.

Now think about your top social site and let’s answer the following questions in the next section of the Deep Dive Social Media Quarterly Review:

 

To keep your focus on creating achievable goals, I recommend that you answer these questions for just one of your social sites. You can repeat this process for each of your social sites that you’ll be using in your marketing plans.

Like you did before, use the Deep Dive Social Media Quarterly Review worksheet to answer these questions. And I’m also sharing my answers below:

Social media goals for:

My Pinterest Strategy Facebook group

What is my big goal for this social site?

It’s not about the numbers! Most people think that the more people you have in the group, the better your group will be.

My big goal for the Pinterest Strategy Facebook group is to increase the engagement of my posts and to see the others sharing, asking questions and answering questions for the others.

I’ve spent First Quarter creating a close-knit community of business owners and bloggers who are helping each other grow their business or blog. And now I want to connect myself closer to them so when I promote my Pinterest Interest Sales Funnel group coaching program, I’m able to sell out the spaces by just posting a link in my Pinterest strategy group.

 

How will I get this done? List 5 action items to help you reach your big goal.

I will continue to be present in my Pinterest Strategy Facebook group.

Five action items that I’ll do to reach my goal:

1. Create a weekly posting schedule to ensure that I’m giving my community good information to help them.
2. Organize monthly events where they can meet with me off of Facebook for free coaching workshops.
3. Start doing more Facebook Live learning sessions to keep checking in with my community to connect with them personally.
4. Do more posts to see what my community needs to help them grow their business or blog.
5. Schedule another Pinterest group working day – everyone who joined us for the first session got some great feedback and made some new connections with the other members.

 

How will I measure my progress?

I will be able to measure my progress by seeing how many people are participating in the conversations and watching how many people are connecting with each other.

I will also set up a posting calendar and I can monitor my progress as I’m actually doing these action steps and not just talking about them.

I will mark this date in my calendar to do my first check-in to see what’s working and what’s not:

 June 29 – I’ll do another quarterly review the last weekend of June to see what’s working and what I need to tweak with my schedule.

 

Time to think about downloading a Social Media Productivity Planner!

The Social Media Productivity Planner is the tool for you when you’re ready to take back control of your minutes. You’re ready to take back control of your schedule. You’re ready to take back the power you feel like you’ve lost to that social game that’s hard to beat.

If you’re ready to do this social media marketing stuff differently, then grab your FREE 18-page glimpse of the Social Media Productivity Planner.

BUT … if you’re:

1. Tired of aimlessly posting wherever and everywhere and getting nowhere.
2. Done with the weekly struggle of what to post or what site to use.
3. Worn out from not knowing why your social strategy isn’t working.

Download the Social Media Productivity Planner! Grab the one tool you need to take you from wishing you had time to grow your business to owning a profitable business.