Twitter Tragedy - Must walk before you run.

The idea that all you need to do is create a Twitter account for a business and tweet occasionally, is a dangerous one. While measuring an ROI on social media marketing can be difficult, that doesn’t mean you can or should forget about setting goals. As an example, the apartment complex I currently reside in launched a social media campaign back in August, “We’ve gone social!” and they promoted their accounts (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) with fliers and t-shirts, which was not a bad start. But as the last few months passed by it became evident that they did not create any goals for their Twitter page.

So how do you avoid tweeting 174 times and get not a single follower? You establish definitive and measurable goals. Social media marketing goals include: improving brand awareness, search engine rankings, relevant site traffic, and conversions performance (e.g., sales for a product or service), as well as reputation management and engaging with consumers.

The challenge for some of these goals, such as engaging with consumers, is to make them specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely (SMART). The following are examples of SMART goals for four popular types of social media: image and video sharing sites, social networking sites, blogs, and microblogs (Twitter).

Image and Video Sharing Sites:

• 30% growth in the number of images or videos viewed within four months
• 10% increase in the number of subscribers to your channel or stream within four months
• 20% increase in average rankings of images or videos by viewers within four months

Social Networking Sites:

• 20% growth in the number of friends within five months
• 30% growth in the number of comments within five months
• 40% growth in the number of posts and comments in discussion groups within five months

Blogs:

• 20% improvement in the ratio of posts to comments (i.e., visitor's comments/posts=conversions) within six months
• 40% growth in total number of views within six months
• 10% growth of RSS subscribers within six months

Microblogs (Twitter):

• 20% growth in number of followers within 30 days
• 30% growth in the number of retweets (message amplification) within 30 days
• 10% increase in click-through-rate (CTR) of the links posted in tweets within 30 days (Hint: Observing which types of links garner the highest CTRs can help you tune your tweets to provide what your consumers with links they are interested in and, hence, further improve your CTR.)
• 5% increase in Web site conversions (e.g., sales) from tweet links within 30 days

Avoid wasted effort by establishing definitive and measurable goals.