Having previously covered the importance of understanding demographics, we will now guide you through setting objectives for your website. Any good plan will have a series of clear reachable objectives. Think of them as a compass for your plans, without them you’re likely to become lost.
If you plan to use social media to achieve your goals, then much like anything else, you need to research and plan your objectives carefully to ensure that you are successful.
Research
Setting realistic objectives become easier with the more research and information you gather. Personally, I like to use a mind-map to lay it all out. It is a great way to split complex issues into smaller manageable parts. It allows you to look at the bigger picture and often identify links between topics that are difficult to notice otherwise.
Whatever you do, do not take research lightly. When starting a new project, good research will not only allow you to really understand your objectives and make them more achievable. After deciding on a budget and time frame, you should consider the following when conducting research:
- Define problems that ‘need’ solutions
- Assess the value of your products, services or creative output
- Identify characteristics of the market(competitors, demographics, consumer, b2b)
- Awareness of factors and trends that may have a direct influence
Setting objectives
Once you have a clear understanding of how similar companies and websites use social media and where you can fit into the same space, you will then need to set specific and actionable objectives. The secret is to set realistic ones… then push yourself that little bit further. Here are some points you should ask yourself:
- What do I want to do?
- How am I going to do this?
- Do I understand the limitations?
- Has this been successfully done by anyone else?
- Do I have the resources?
- Do I have the time?
- How do I measure success?
- Can I complete it in a specified period of time?
- Is it realistic?
- What happens if I achieve my objectives?
If using social media is a sizable chunk of your plan, then It is important to know what you want from social media. Setting objectives with social media allows you to measure success or change. Depending on what you want to achieve there are different ways to fulfill your objectives.
Once you have your objectives in mind, you can then go back and analyse what sites and tools will help you best achieve your goals. If your main goal is to monitor feedback about your business/product/website, then start to think about the websites and tools that can help achieve your aims. A blog with a comments section, a site like GetSatisfaction or even something like Twitter can enable you to find out what your customers are thinking.
If you can’t provide the necessary time or resources to your overall aims, then you might need to think of a different strategy. A half-hearted effort is more likely to do more harm than good.
Be Specific
It is important to be specific so that you do not miss any relevant steps. Therefore, if things are not working out as planned, it will be easier to identify why. Let’s say as an example that you want to sell eBooks. A non-specific objective would be:
I want to sell 30 ebooks a week.
A good specific objective would be:
To sell 30 ebooks to website owners in my first 2 week through social media marketing, I would need to:
- Give away free ebooks to voices of influence in the niche for testimonials
- Find out where I can reach website owners
- Participate in relevant communities for 3 hours a day to build up my authority
- Marketing my eBook as a different product than my competitors
- Increase my traffic from these targeted websites by x amount
- Convert at a rate of 1%
- Monitor my results so that I can improve on them
Breaking your objectives down into precise components allows you to fully understand what you have to do to achieve them. Your objectives should be challenging, but not overwhelming. Setting too easy, or too difficult tasks will only be de-motivating. A sign of a good objective is that if anyone else reads it, they will be able to understand how to do what you want to do.
Finding your Audience
After reading our post on demographics, you should have some idea about the type of people you want to reach. Now you have to find them. Take a look at this list of social media sites. It is helpfully split into various categories.
If your site is about music then check out the music category first and so on. Obviously, the larger sites such as StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit will cover a wider variety of topics. Take a look at the topics that are generally popular on social news and bookmark sites to see if your site might be of interest to that community.
Monitor and Improve
Consider how you are able to monitor your plans. The key aspect of having objectives is that you will be able to monitor optimise them. Be sure that you have identified the variables that affect you. For example, if you are looking to reach x amount of feedreaders in y time scale, then you should be looking at:
- What kind of content gets me more readers?
- What effect does the length of the article have on new readers?
- How likely are my typical audience likely to use RSS feeds?
- How can I teach my audience about the value of RSS?
- When is the best time to publish?
- What rate are other websites in my field growing and why?
Here are some monitoring tools which might come in handy.
These are just a few examples of questions you can ask yourself when setting objectives. In the next couple of weeks we’ll be producing a mammoth table based on known demographics for hundreds of major social networks, social news and social bookmarking sites that you can view and control.
