What Do You Really Want? Honing in on Goals for a Social Media Plan

Do you really know what you want to get out of a campaign? A project? A conversation? While there's merit to letting things happen naturally and with fluidity, having a set of goals in the back of your head is key to accomplishing any given task. It's important to zoom out and look at the big picture and decide how to tackle issues at hand before diving into a project.

Start from the finish line. When creating a social media plan, or any communications plan for that matter, start from the end and work backwards. What date would you like to complete everything by? It can take some fanning of the fire to get a social media buzz going with only free communications tools at your disposal, so allow yourself at least a few months to accomplish your goal.

Decide on what you specifically want to accomplish. You'll have to build your social media plan differently, depending on whether you want more Twitters followers and Facebook fans, more interactions between fans, more comments, more stories, more donations or more traffic to your website? If you want more of all of the above, you may want to focus on a couple of areas to start with. Think about which areas would make the biggest impact both externally and internally. In other words, focus on what seems like the most effective way to reach out to your audiences, whether than entails attracting new ones or strengthening relationships with the audiences you have, and also think about a way to measure and increase ROI, which you can report back to your organizations' leaders to validate your efforts.

Break it down, count backwards. Teachers make unit plans, or big, overarching plans, for 2- to 3-month periods and then break the steps into manageable goals to shoot for on a week-by-week basis, then a day-by-day basis, then a task-by-task basis. Treat you plan the same way. For example, if you ultimately want to deepen your relationship with Facebook fans, every week, you might want to plot out several stories with photos or videos to share, a question, an interesting fact and a call to action to include.

Evaluate as you go. Remember that your plan is just that, a plan. Make assessments and adjustments along the way to optimize your messaging. Let your decisions be guided by your goals and audiences. The old adage that the customer is always right essentially remains true in online communications. Don't abandon your plans to appease the masses, but if a message isn't resonating, you'd better get some audience feedback. A few ways to evaluate include looking through bit.ly hits to see how many clicks your links are getting, asking a friend or outside source if they understand what is being shared with and asked of him or her and encouraging feedback and responses as often as possible. Survey Monkey is a great free tool that can help you evaluate your progress mid-way through the campaign. Offering the chance to win something small for completing a survey can offer some incentive for helping you find your footing.

Don't turn around. Keep moving forward with your plan, even if you're not getting the results you had hope for. A few minor tweaks may completely turn your campaign around and know that some folks might just take awhile to get invested in what you're doing. Halting a plan before it has been completed won't get you anywhere. Instead, try to power through and evaluate and make adjustments for the next time around. There will be plenty of opportunities to try out ideas and get the hang of what you're doing, so try to stay optimistic and see your plans through.