Can you believe we are in the fourth quarter? For me, it’s been a whirlwind of a year. Especially in my business time management aka taking back my time, it gave birth to my Digital Digest. Which leads me to share some of the ways I have been able to take back my time, in hopes that it will help you get closer to your social media marketing goals.

This year I had many women come to me for community management, and many of them share one common pain point; they have no time or interest in social media let alone using it for marketing. While they all recognize the power in it to reach a broader market, they also shared, the stress of how much there is to learn with so little time. Now, we all know we can make time to learn a new skill or trade. Still, let’s face it, at this point in our businesses we want to focus on what we are most passionate about serving our customers. For these women, that translates into their talents, companies, and missions to bring women from all over the world closer together.

So how do you set goals for your social media? How do you know if what you are doing is helping your business bring in sales or building brand awareness? How is it moving the needle for marketing?

Here is what I know for sure; your business mission, and you have to be clear on who your audience is and what value it brings. Once this is complete, you are either ready to meet with a strategist or hand over your social media marketing to a community manager.

These are the seven steps you will need to get in order when taking back your time:

1. The Business Plan: A clear business plan with profit producing services or products

2. Audience Personas: This by far was my favorite to create. See my girl Pam from Spread Ideas Move People. We had a great time creating these and she has some great tips on what to consider when creating these personas. Think Geico and Allstate, are you in good hands? lol

4. Branding: All your branding material done, logo, sub logo, banners, colors, fonts. You are going to need this for your website and social media graphics. Your going to want to see Pam for this too.

5. Social Media Marketing Plan:  With “Smart Goals”  and clear benchmarks for when you would like to see results from your goals.

6. Marketing Tools: Get some tools not too many tools just ones that will save you time with getting the ball rolling on productivity and social media management.

Here are some of my favorites

• For productivity Trello and Click up.

7. Social media management and content planning: Now for this, it honestly depends on what your goals are, and the content you plan to share. Keep in mind  there are so many good ones but here are my go to’s for different reasons, Buffer and Tailwind. (Leave me a comment if you want to know why.)

I can’t EVEN begin to tell you how much time I have saved by having a clear understanding of these items. As a strategist and business owner, one of the biggest reasons why we are exhausted, don't see results and can't find the time to manage our social media marketing is because some of us are unclear on all if not some of the six items I listed. It happens, and as your business evolves it will happen but this time around you WILL be prepared with a clear business plan and a social media marketing plan that aligns.

In my time as a community manager, I have seen brands grow in numbers when their social media messaging is clear to their audience. It may not happen overnight, but with consistency and much engagement, you will watch your community grow.

So, what does this all say for you and how does this relate to you setting clear goals. You grab social media by the URL's, (lol get it the URL's? No ok. Sorry that was a tech joke.) Let’s get back to it. You set clear goals  by focusing on one platform and following a strategic social media marketing plan. You stop wasting time where it doesn’t matter and start meeting your customers on the platforms where they are consuming and engaging with you. 

Bueno, may your Q4 goals be tighter than your hair ties, until next month.

Nos fuimos!

RitaVee