By Roger G. Best

In case I wasn’t perfectly clear on this in my last installment, I was (as in “past tense”) a BIG opponent of most social media until recent months.  There are lots of reason for that, but the big one is because of the enormous risk of losing a lot of productivity and getting sucked into the black hole that social media creates in the lives of some users.  I still believe that it’s important to draw some boundaries (time is the biggest one) and be completely inflexible when it comes to crossing those lines.  With that foundation, let’s move on.

If you plan to use Twitter for business purposes, I’d strongly recommend establishing SMART (Specific, Measuragle, Attainable, Realistic and Timely) goals, along with a clear plan of the ROI.  What you are looking for here is a clear understanding about the time that will be required and what you expect to come of that investment.  Let’s start with with the goal.

Clearly Define Your Goals

It’s always a good idea to know where you want to end up before you head out on the journey.  Don’t just jump into the deep end of the pool before you decide what’s important, both as it applies to your social media strategies and how they affect bottom line.  A lot of these issues will revolve around “followers” but it’s important ti understand that the number isn’t the only thing that’s important.  The type of followers is as important as the quantity.  With that being said, you will want to track the number of followers and have some plan in place to be sure that those followers are valuable to your business.

Initially, the number of followers may look somewhat miniscule compared to some others that you may run across.  I’ve got to tell you that there were times when I looked at some that I was following and saw that they had 16,132 followers to my 12, I worried that I might be missing something.  Was I ever relieved when I was up to 30 something in a couple of days.  O.K., it’s still not much, but a lot better than it was a day or so back.  My main point here is to be realistic when you set goals for the number of new followers that you expect to gain every month.  Beyond the number, you need to look at the followers themselves.  I regularily go though my followers and remove the spammers, and those accounts that are following 1400 people with only 34 following them (you know the ones I’m talking about, they have one tweet and it’s a link to their photos).  It’s not just numbers… if I have 5000 followers but 4898 of them are people trying to get me to join their “dating” site, or convince me to join them in some MLM endeavor, I’m unlikely to gain much from those followers.

Your goals should be achievable and measurable. One of the strengths of Twitter is driving traffic to your blog.  It takes effort to write these things and I really want someone to read them.  Twitter is an excellent tool to help me achieve that goal.  Again, set a goal and figure out a way to track that goal.  Since Twitter is a micro blogger and you’re limited to 140 characters, your 123 character URL will greatly limit your ability to entice others to read your blog.  That’s why we all use one of those URL shortening tools.  Pick one that will track the number of clicks and other stitistics that will be helpful so you can measure your success.  Again, define your goals and track your results.

I’ll pick up here tomorrow and we’ll cover a few of the Twitter goals that you can easily track include giveaways, hashtag (#) campaigns, link sharing, retweets, referrers, total followers, total following, and tweets per day, week, or month.

Have a great day,

Roger

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 27th, 2009 at 12:57 pm and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.