That quote from Nietzsche is so fundamental to anything you do. We should all have it tattooed somewhere. The question applies to any walk of life, but I’m focusing on social media – why are you doing it? You have to ask yourself why you’re doing anything, whether it’s starting a blog, opening a Twitter account or running a competition. If you don’t know why you’re doing it, then the answer is that you shouldn’t really be doing it. And if your answer is either just because your competitors are, or because someone told you that you had to get involved with social media, then you shouldn’t really be doing it either. If you have a clear goal in mind, then this is going to sharpen your focus, drive your strategy forward and you’ll achieve tangible results for your business.

One of the biggest mistakes you can make, is to figure out your KPIs halfway through your activity, when you start to see what’s happening. This is almost too little too late, because you’re part-way through the campaign and it’s been run in such a way that it doesn’t have a clear focus and you’ll end up chasing your tail. You also need to be smart about it. Let’s not beat around the bush, you’re probably experimenting with social media because you want to increase sales. That’s great, but that’s not a metric that easily fits social media so you won’t really know if you’ve ever got there, if you’re not focusing on the other metrics that are going to help you achieve that goal.

Know the medium, understand the metric

If you really understand the medium that you’re participating in, then you can hope to define clear goals and know how to measure if you’re achieving these or not. With social media, it’s so easy to be everywhere, trying to do everything and staying ahead of the curve without really having a clue if it’s working for you. So you end up doing everything, all the time, because you can’t risk rocking the boat. But if you’re taking the time to slow down, look at the metrics available to you and working out what fits for your business, then you’re going to have an ultimately more successful campaign. You’re going to understand what the numbers are telling you and be able to assess how well they’re working for you.

The key is to be smart about your aims of a campaign. There’s no point running a photo competition just to get entries and tick that ‘photo’ box. What about running a photo competition so you’ve then got great content to add to your Facebook page, that’s going to create engagement with your community and help to grow your fan numbers? Using what you’ve got at different stages and in different places, to help you reach that end goal. If you’re setting those clear goals at the start of the campaign, then it’s going to focus  your energy. If you know the aim is to bring people to the Facebook page then you’ll ensure that it’s updated with good, sticky content that will give people a reason to stay around.

In any area of business you would have your key aims in mind and social media shouldn’t be any different. I’m not suggesting that it always has to be tied to sales. If you want to use social media as a contact point for customer service reps, then optimise your profiles in that way. Encourage people to ask you questions, build a community where your customers are beginning to help each other out with queries. But then look at how efficient these channels are, compared to your traditional call centres and you might find it’s worth focusing your efforts online. If it’s going to make you more efficient as a company – excellent. Have this as your focus from the very start and you’ll have a chance at achieving something great through social media.

Don’t be disheartened

Without knowing why you’re doing something, it’s easy to see all your effort as wasted. You’ll never know if you’re doing something well, because you haven’t defined what doing something “well” is. It can then easily seem like a pointless exercise. If you’re tracking how well you’re doing along the way and you’re slowly creeping towards that ultimate aim then it’s going to spur you on. Write your aims down, know them inside out and ensure that everyone that’s working on the campaign knows them inside out as well.

Asking yourself why you’re doing something is so important, yet so easy to forget. Like I said, it applies to everything. Make sure you have a reason for doing something and you’ll get there quicker. When was the last time you asked yourself why you’re doing something?

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