Marketing Roadhouse

Goals. Some set their goals in the beginning of their social media planning and never look at them again. Others, don’t bother setting any goals and just dive right in to using the tools. The biggest problem with either of these conditions is you don’t know how you are performing.

Do you have goals? Do you remember what they are? If yes, you get a gold star. Another gold star if you are measuring to assess your success towards reaching those goals. If there are any of you still reading, let’s get back on track with your goals.

If you have goals, but have long forgot about them, you should first evaluate if your goals are still relevant and make sense for your business. Business evolves, and so do your audience and goals. This is the reason I’m a big believer of reviewing your goals, at the very least, on a yearly basis. When it comes to social media, you may want to consider reviewing your goals every 6 months.

If you don’t have goals, there is no better time than the present. Goals can help you stay focused on your social media activities and help you determine your success. Each tool you have may have a very different goal and target audience. This is yet another reason to reconsider auto posting to all your accounts.

Take a few moments and look at what you are doing and where you want to head. Do you remember what your goals are?

Consistently providing relevant and useful content to your target audience can be a challenge. I hear quite often, that people sit down at their computer, bring up Twitter or Facebook and just don’t know what to type. It can be even more difficult if you have been active in social media for awhile. You feel like you have said it all before. If this sounds like you, you are not alone.

We have already talked about making sure you are still creating content for your target audience and looking at your engagement levels. Evaluating these can very well lead to some new content ideas, but if you are still struggling, let’s get back to some basics.

I know I have brought up the editorial calendar before, but it really does work. If you don’t have one, add creating one for November to you to do list. I have been consistently using one for some time now and I find I am able to better concentrate on my content. I admit, I have been much better about content on this blog than my spokes as of late.

Curate, don’t just create. Jay Baer has a great post on curation vs. creation research that you should check out. We often fall into the thinking that we need to be always creating our own content because people will find the other content. This is not necessarily the case. People are busy and if you can curate the best news and links for them, you are providing a great resource.

So these are just two things to give you a boost in generating content. Are you using one or both of these methods?

I feel like this is the easiest way to get off track with social media, and I have found myself fall into this on a regular basis. Depending on your industry, it is easy to start creating content for those that are your peers and not your target audience. Of course, if your peers are your target audience, you can completely skip this post.

What do I mean by peers? These can be people that do a job similar to you in your industry. For example, say you are a small business that makes soap, your peers would be other soap makers. Now while it is great to engage with them through social media, your target market is most likely retailers that would carry your soap and direct customers.

I feel like it is pretty natural to start engaging with your peers, because they are more likely to comment and provide feedback due to their shared passion in what you do. The problem becomes when you start creating content to increase engagement with your peers rather than who you are targeting. Again, it is so easy to do because you want to increase the engagement you are seeing, but it doesn’t get you closer to your goals.

Take a step back and look at who has been engaging you. Is it your target audience? Is it your peers? Is it both? If your answer is your target audience or both, then you get a gold star for this assignment. If it is mainly your peers, you still have to dig a little deeper as to why. Maybe your target audience isn’t technically inclined causing them to not leave comments, but are still reading.

Realistically, you can look at your content and see if it is geared to your audience or not:

1. Does it use the language they use?
2. Does it solve their problems and/or address their pain points?
3. Are you being a resource or just promoting?

If you still aren’t sure, try a new approach. Throw some new types of content out there and see what happens. I’ve done that right here and have heard some positive feedback. What have I missed?