Your Number One Social Media Goal

Last week, we discussed social media strategic planning, and everyone wrote about it on their blogs.

Most of you (correctly) identified the importance to defining goals as the first step in your social media strategic planning process.

But defining goals can be a tricky task, and different companies or organizations will of course have vastly different goals, and as a result, vastly different social media campaigns. That goes without saying.

But there is one goal that every social media plan should have in common.

It sounds easy, but is surprisingly difficult.

I can summarize it in one word.

Are you ready to hear what it is?

The one goal every social media plan should have in common is:

Listen.

No matter what platform suits your organization best, no matter what your end social media strategic plan looks like, you will lose out if you do not in some way use social media to listen to your clients.

People want to feel like the companies or organizations that they do business with care about them. People want to feel like they matter. People want to feel like their thoughts, feelings and ideas matter to someone and that they are heard by anyone who can make a difference.

The old PR model of broadcasting a message out on as many channels as possible is not quite dead yet, but it is certainly not enough.

The social media model is a two-way street. People may choose to listen to what you have to say, but now you have to give them a reason to.

But the reason can be as easy (and as achingly difficult) as just taking the time to listen, and let your clients or customers know you are listening.

At the very least, it's a good first step - and it must be part of your social media planning and implementation.