As a B2B Marketing Consultant, I am often asked how many messages a business should post on their social media accounts. Yesterday I was reviewing Hubspot information and saw that they recommend no more than two or three updates on Facebook each week. It got me thinking about the importance of strategic planning and tactical goal setting in marketing – even for what seem to be the easiest tactics.
If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. In fact, in a blog entry with this title, In Social Media, Failing to Plan is Planning to Fail, Brian Solis sites a Gartner statistic that 70% of social media campaigns will fail in 2011. Brian cites a lack of planning for the failure of social media campaigns, including not getting the buy-in from top management, not identifying business objectives, failing to identify how to measure results, and failing to integrate social media into the entire business – not just the marketing.
But even if you have a strategic plan, you also need a tactical plan that should include SMART goals: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely. Read my previous post, Is Your Marketing Plan SMART?, for more on this. When you plan your social media, write down some quantifiable goals for each activity. How many blog posts will you write each week? How long should they be? How often will you update LinkedIn? Facebook? How many Tweets will you send? Here are my suggestions:
- Blog entries: 1-3 per week
- Facebook updates: 2-3 per week
- LinkedIn Status updates: 5 per week
- Tweets: 1+ per day (keeps the doctor away?)
Without these social media target goals in your marketing plan, you could be part of Gartner’s 70% failure statistic. With stated goals, you’re much more likely to achieve the results you want and need for your business.
Not reaching your social media marketing goals? New Incite offers several outsource services to help – see our Outsource Social Media Services page for more information.
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