Doing a Deep Dive into Planning
Like every other small business owner, I’ve been working on my plans for 2016.
My usual planning for the next year is a full day session of reviewing, recapping, brainstorming and creating quarterly plans with all the programs I’m developing and launching. I love all this planning stuff – breaking down my programs and action items in calendars and filling out questions and numbers and ideas into printables that I’ve created to review everything.
But this year is different.
I’ve spent the past year experimenting with new social media tracking programs. I’ve monitored my social media sites, reviewed Insights and analytics and kept notes about what worked and what didn’t. I tweaked and shifted and added and deleted.
I even changed my marketing strategy on my Facebook fan page because of what I learned from the work I’ve done with all this tracking stuff.
My year-long tracking experiment turned my usual planning day into something that will help me grow my business in 2016.
This year’s planning went from a one day session to many deep dive mini sessions. I dug a little deeper into my social sites than just looking at my fan numbers and thinking about some ideas about what I want to see happen in the new year.
My 2016 planning has turned into looking into what really worked with my social sites this year and what could have gone better.
Let’s Review What Happened
The first step to help you plan your social media goals is to review what happened this year. It’s like I always say, “How do you know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been?”
Reviewing your social sites for 2015 is more than just writing out the number of followers you gained { or worse, lost! } every month. It’s more about why you’re spending your valuable time in your social sites. It’s about learning how posting in Facebook or tweeting helped you grow your business or blog.
Social Media 2015 Review:
Let’s just get this out of the way – you know you want to do this so go ahead and write out all your social site numbers.
Make notes of which sites saw an increase and which ones didn’t do so well. Your follower and fan numbers are great to use as benchmarks but that’s not the only thing we want to review.
Time to dig a little deeper and answer these questions. You can pull up a word document, write out your notes in a notebook or use my free printable Year End Tracking worksheet:
1. What did your social sites help you accomplish this year?
2. Which social site was time well spent and brought you the most web site traffic and/or sales?
3. Which social site was a waste of your time and didn’t bring anything to your business?
4. What was your biggest challenge with your social sites?
5. How did you handle your challenges?
6. What could you have done better to deal with your challenges?
7. What do you want to see change in your social sites in 2016?
Social Media Goals for 2016
Now that you’ve reviewed what happened this year with your social sites, it’s time to make some plans for 2016.
When you did your review, what seemed to be a consistent pattern that happened? Did you struggle to find time to post or schedule to your sites? Was your engagement down because you didn’t know what content to post?
Think about your biggest challenge with your social sites and we’ll use this information to help you create your social media goals for 2016.
Now think about your top social site and answer the following questions.
{ To keep your focus on creating achievable goals, I recommend that you answer these questions for just one of your social sites. You can repeat this process for as many social sites that you’ll be using in 2016. }
Like you did before, you can pull up a word document, write out your notes in a notebook or use my free printable Year End Tracking worksheet:
1. Social media goals for _______________
2. What is my big goal for this social site?
3. How will this help my business or blog?
4. How will I get this done? List 5 action items to help you reach your big goal.
5. What is preventing me from making this happen?
6. How will I measure my progress?
7. I will mark this date in my calendar to do my first check-in to see what’s working and what’s not:
Which one will you be?
Planning your social media goals is more than just writing down some numbers and making predictions that you’ll grow your Facebook fans by 20%. Yeah, we do need to know these numbers to give us something to measure our progress but does that fan number really help you grow your business?
No, not really.
If there’s anything that my social experiments have taught me this year and it’s that social media really can help grow your business.
Being on social media can help you connect with the right people who want to buy your stuff. It’ll help you share your content and bring more traffic to your site. It’ll be that one piece of the planning puzzle that brings you closer to your goals.
As you’re working through your planning for 2016 and you get to that part about your social media, ask yourself which one of these will you be:
- Proactive person who uses your challenges from last year to make things happen.
- Someone on the sidelines who watches things happen.
- Or you’ll just look at your numbers every month and wonder what happened.
PS What if you could find a way to grow your presence in your social sites? And what if it didn’t add hours to your already crazy day? What if it took just 30 minutes a few times a week?
Click here to learn more how to manage your social sites with the 30 Minute Social Sessions workbook
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