Long gone are the days when companies could leave a single intern to just ‘do’ their social media. Whatever you’re looking to achieve - perhaps building brand awareness, recruiting or crisis management - teams need to sit down and map out a decisive and rigorous social media strategy, and your overall objectives are where you should start...

Objectives are the top level aspirations you’re ultimately aiming to achieve for your business. More often than not, they’ll have something to do with your bottom line, but there are some other areas you could endeavor to make improvements, like audience growth, brand reach and awareness, customer service and loyalty, and engagement.

Next on the agenda is establishing goals. Your goals should be simple descriptions of the steps you want to take to achieve your overall objectives. They're a declaration of your intention and your expectations - expressed using terms like “increase”, “reduce” or “identify” - that your team can turn to when making important decisions. Any goal worth setting should be SMART, and we don’t just mean ‘clever’. They’ll need to be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Let’s take it from the top...

Your goals need to be as specific as possible. Ask yourself whether they answer the questions “who?”, “what?”, “where?”, “when?”, and “why?” Surely one of the best things about goals is the moment you accomplish them, right? But you won’t notice unless you can measure your progress and success, and don't forget to make sure they're actually achievable in the first place!

Next up, relevance. This one’s especially important. For your goals to be valuable and not just vanity driven, they need to align with your overall objectives. They need to help you accomplish the thing you set out to do. Lastly, putting time restrictions on your goals might not seem necessary, but it’s worth it. If you set yourself a start and end date, you’ll tackle your goals with a greater sense of urgency, your campaign will be more organized, and it’ll gather more momentum.

Did you get all of that? Well, here’s an example for good measure - ‘increase subscriber count by 50% on YouTube in 6 months’. I think we can agree that it’s specific, it’s measurable, because you can count the amount of subscribers you gain, and as you can see it’s time-bound. Is it relevant? Well, it is if one of your business objectives is audience growth. As for whether it’s achievable, well, that’s for you and your business to decide.

Now, it’s worth noting that although SMART is a very commonly used framework when it comes to setting objectives, there are many others to choose from, so you’ll need to decide on the one that works best for your business. Let’s compare SMART to some of the other frameworks out there…

Strategy & Planning