Photo by graymalkn

Almost every time I speak to a group or an individual about social media, they interrupt to tell me that there is no way they have time to spend using social media tools, especially Twitter. I read a post over at “It’s Just Gabe” where I left a comment that I thought people felt it took too much time because they had no goal in mind when beginning to use Twitter, Facebook LinkedIn, etc.

I’ve thought about this topic a lot since it seems to be the number one objection from people. I’m sure there are a lot of abandoned accounts out there across all the social media sites. I asked the question to my Twitter friends of why they thought people abandon their Twitter accounts fairly quickly. Some of the responses along with my own thoughts are:

- Tried it, but didn’t understand it enough to take full advantage of it and left.
- Those users that left, had a little initial success and then plateaued and lost interest.
- Didn’t have any immediate success
- Not willing to engage others and just wanedt to broadcast a sales message

Ultimately, I keep coming back to the lack of goals as the root of abandoned accounts. If you jump in and start using social media tools with no plan or goals, you most likely will feel that you have wasted time because nothing has happened. To be honest, I’m not sure what people expect to happen without a goal in mind or at the very least a sense for what they want to get out of the experience. Like any other marketing tool, it is not a silver bullet, you are not going to post one tweet and gain 10,000 followers and make millions of dollars.

Now when I talk about setting goals, these can either be quantifiable like increasing sales or visits to your Web site by X, or it can be harder to measure like improving customer service, thought leadership or exposure. Your goals should also help you to determine how long you are going to execute your plan before measuring and making the decision to pull the plug or keep moving forward. Your goals will help to define how you will use the tool and what you will communicate with your audience. As you spend more time using the tool, you may have to revisit your goals as they may change as you learn new things or discover new opportunities.

Time management may still be an issue for some even after setting goals. I will address that as a future post since I really want the take away here to be that setting goals will help you to know how to use a tool, why you are using it and ultimately how much time to spend using it. I would love to hear your thoughts on the subject.

Thanks to @ahad_kamal @mrabey and @mjovel for responding to my Twitter question.