If you don’t set objectives for your social media campaign, how can you expect results?

• Are you responsible your social media campaign?
• Have you set any goals or objectives?

Most social media campaigns are set up without any forward planning and without any discussion around what the outcomes should be. 

In fact, the majority are managed back to front: profiles are set up, updates are put and only then do companies start talking about their expectations.

So how should you proceed with your campaign? What is the “right order” for running your campaign?

Before you even start your campaign, you need to:

1. Set our clearly the objectives you’d like to achieve from the campaign. These need to be measurable.
   e.g. Attract 10 new clients via LinkedIn
2. Put together a bullet point list detailing how you are going to achieve these objectives.
3. Decide and make note of who your target audience and who are the influencers who will help you amplify your message to them.
4. Agree on which platform or platforms you are going to use to reach, contact and communicate with this target audience.
5. Create a list of what you will say to attract their attention. You may need a number of messages or actions and you may need to craft different messages for subgroups within your target audience.
6. Finally, you need to decide what the final result should look like and if there is a time frame for this to be achieved.

By way of example, let’s say you’re a law firm looking to attract clients in the property sector. So based on the suggested order above they would:

1. Focus on interacting with LinkedIn groups in the property sector
2. Focus on sending targeted status updates to LinkedIn connections advising them on property law
3. Leverage their first level LinkedIn connections within the property sector so that they can get recommendations or introductions to new clients
4. Finally they will gather the results of their activity to measure the campaigns success. This could be a measure as simple asking their partners to keep a spreadsheet logging all new LinkedIn contacts during the course of the campaign.

   In our next blog: we’ll be discussing the metrics you can use to measure your campaign.

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