Before jumping on the Twitter bandwagon with your business, there are some important things to consider to help achieve social media success. Follow these quick tips to ensure you are setting goals and optimizing results and ROI.

Determine what you want to accomplish

What are the objectives behind creating your Twitter account? If your answer is, “because everyone else is on Twitter,” you should probably revaluate. Do you want to use Twitter to drive traffic to your website or blog?  Find and target prospects? Use it as a place your customers can come to get support or ask questions? Determine what the purpose is for you developing your Twitter profile first, this will help drive the creation of your Twitter goals.

Develop S.M.A.R.T. goals

Making sure your goals are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely is key to setting out goals for any social media platform.

Being specific about what you want to accomplish can literally mean diving as deep as how many tweets you’d like to create within a daily or weekly basis, how many followers you want, and how much engagement you’re aiming for –  the more specific the better.

Make sure your goals are measurable. Followers, mentions, favourites, retweets, visits, and even leads and sales from Twitter are all measurable goals.

The importance of setting goals that are attainable is crucial to garnering success. When setting your goals, make sure that you account for your time and resources.

Similarly, you have to be realistic.  Twitter is like anything else in business, you need to devote time and resources to be able to be successful.  You can’t expect to gain a big following, drive a lot of traffic to your website, or create new leads and new business from sending out a few tweets a week.

Lastly, make sure your Twitter goals are timely.   Put together a social media calendar for all blogs, content, and social media posts that you can plan your Tweets around.

Decide on the who and the what

Be sure that you know who will be held accountable for your Twitter profile, ensuring all involved understand your Twitter goals, and abide by your business’ social media policy.  Twitter also recently came out with a new feature that allows multiple users access to a company’s account without having to share passwords.

Also decide on what tools you should use for Twitter.  There’s tools such as Buffer that can help you schedule posts, Followerwonk that helps find accounts and conversations, and even free tools like Hootsuite that let you view and manage multiple accounts and conversations.

Be realistic

Despite the fact I already laid this out in the S.M.A.R.T. goal setting above, it is one of the key components of setting goals that many people overlook. Whether your goal is to grow followers, increase engagement, or draw attention and traffic to your website, it’s important to recognize that this will not happen overnight.

Building and growing your Twitter profile will take time and commitment. If you aren’t really sure what would be realistic for your business, check out your competitors and see what their following and engagement is like. This will help guide where you should be setting the bar moving forward, and most importantly don’t forget that it is okay to reevaluate.

Don’t be afraid to reevaluate

The hardest part about setting goals for your Twitter is not really having an idea whether or not your goals are realistic or not. Many times you may feel your goals are realistic and practical to accomplish, but then when you start to actually work towards them you realize you may have projected the results too high.

Don’t be afraid to take a step back and alter your goals. Many people are afraid to do this because they feel they are taking the easy way out, but you may just realize that your predictions and timelines are just unrealistic. Having comprehensive goals for your Twitter account will not only guarantee that you will succeed but also hold you accountable for your Twitter account.