Start the New Year Off Right
Like every other small business owner, I worked through my plans for my business in 2017.
My usual planning for the next year is a full day session of reviewing, recapping, brainstorming and creating quarterly plans with all the programs I’m developing and launching. I love all this planning stuff – breaking down my programs and action items in calendars and filling out questions and numbers and ideas into printables that I’ve created to review everything.
But last year was different.
I’ve spent the past year experimenting with new social media tracking programs. I’ve monitored my social media sites, reviewed Insights and analytics and kept notes about what worked and what didn’t. I tweaked and shifted and added and deleted.
I even changed my marketing strategy on where to focus my time because of what I learned from all this tracking stuff.
This year’s planning went from a one day intensive session to many deep dive mini sessions. I dug a little deeper into my social sites than just looking at my fan numbers and thinking about some ideas about what I want to see happen in the new year.
My 2017 planning has turned into reviewing what really worked with my social sites last year and what could have gone better.
Let’s Review What Happened
The first step to help you plan your social media goals is to review what happened last year. 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 2016 is more than just writing out the number of followers you gained { or worse, lost! } every month. It’s more about why you’re spending your valuable time in your social sites. It’s about learning how posting in Facebook or pinning that image helped you grow your business or blog.
Social Media 2016 Review:
Let’s just get this out of the way – you know you want to do this so go ahead and write out all your social site numbers.
Make notes of which sites saw an increase and which ones didn’t do so well. Your follower and fan numbers are great to use as benchmarks but that’s not the only thing we want to review.
Time to dig a little deeper and answer these questions. You can pull up a word document, write out your notes in a notebook or use my free printable Social Media Review Guide:
1. What did your social sites help you accomplish this year?
2. Which social site was time well spent and brought you the most web site traffic and/or sales?
3. Which social site was a waste of your time and didn’t bring anything to your business?
4. What was your biggest challenge with your social sites?
5. How did you handle your challenges?
6. What could you have done better to deal with your challenges?
7. What do you want to see change in your social sites in 2017?
Social Media Goals for 2017
Now that you’ve reviewed what happened last year with your social sites, it’s time to make some plans for 2017.
When you did your review, what seemed to be a consistent pattern that happened? 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 for 2017.
Now think about your business goals and do the following steps:
Like you did before, you can pull up a word document, write out your notes in a notebook or use the second section called My Next Big Social Media Goal in the free printable Social Media Review Guide:
1. List your top 3 social media goals for the month. Be specific and use real numbers, something that you can actually track.
2. How will you get this done? List 4 action items you can do in that month to reach your goal.
3. Finally, fill in the section to mark the dates in your calendar to do check-ins to see what’s working and what’s not – and then write these dates in your calendar to make sure you that you monitor whether your action steps are working or need tweaking.
Which one will you be?
Planning your social media goals is more than just writing down some numbers and making predictions that you’ll grow your Facebook fans by 20%. Yeah, we do need to know these numbers to give us something to measure our progress but does that fan number really help you grow your business?
No, not really.
If there’s anything that my social experiments have taught me, it’s that social media really can help grow your business.
Being on social media can help you connect with the right people who want to click that Buy Now button. It’ll help you share your content and bring more traffic to your site. It’ll be that one piece of the planning puzzle that brings you closer to your goals.
As you’re working through your planning for 2017 and you get to that part about your social media, ask yourself which one of these will you be:
- Proactive person who uses your challenges from last year to make things happen.
- Someone on the sidelines who watches things happen.
- Or you’ll just look at your numbers every month and wonder what happened.
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