When starting any campaign on a constantly-revolving social media platform like Twitter, it’s important to take a bird’s-eye view and determine an appropriate strategy and tactical approach.

Who will you be targeting? What is the desired end result? What is the goal of this campaign?

Asking these questions and making these decisions before a campaign begins allows you to set expectations and measure success. By knowing the baseline for your Twitter account, you are able to make a more informed decision about what’s needed to boost performance. Creating a goal or goals for your Twitter campaign also ensures that intentions are clear on what you hope to achieve.

Benchmark Your Account’s Performance

Take Advantage of Twitter Analytics  

Before setting goals, benchmark the performance of your company’s Twitter account to attain a solid understanding of existing performance. Benchmarking also allows you to make adjustments to the campaign as needed for optimal engagement.

Kick off your benchmarking process by opening up Twitter Analytics and looking into your account’s history by adjusting the date range in view. Reviewing existing data, such as engagement rates and follower growth, will give you the insight you need to set specific, attainable goals for your upcoming campaign.

Study Your Competitors

It’s a good rule of thumb to benchmark your Twitter following and engagement against your competitors. Assessing the content and types of campaigns your company’s competitors are running can spark new ideas and approaches for your company’s Twitter page. This type of benchmarking should be done on an ongoing basis. In addition, it can provide valuable insight for goal setting if your existing Twitter account has limited or no data.

Set S.M.A.R.T. Goals

Setting goals is a critical part of implementing a Twitter campaign. Without defined goals in place, you have no way to determine how successful your campaign was executed. Goals for a Twitter campaign should be aligned with the company objectives as this ensures that these goals are helping the company to attain its overall mission.

One goal-setting strategy is to make goals S.M.A.R.T. This stands for: Specific, Measureable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-Bound.

Let’s take a look at a S.M.A.R.T. goal for Twitter:

Specific: State exactly what you hope to accomplish with the campaign. For example, increase Twitter followers by 15% to raise awareness about the summer campaign.

Measurable: Have a clear metric in place for measuring success. If your Twitter followers grow from 500 to 575, there was a 15% increase and the goal was met.

Achievable: If followers have grown slowly in the past, don’t expect them to grow rapidly overnight. Set a goal that is attainable and use action-oriented verbs like ‘increase’ or ‘engage.’

Relevant: A common key objective is to raise brand awareness and by increasing followers, this equates to boosting awareness about a company and this specific campaign.

Time-bound: A goal needs a specific time period on it. Goals can be as short as daily or as long as quarterly.

An example of a S.M.A.R.T. goal:

To increase followers on our Twitter page by 15% to raise awareness for our summer campaign on saving water from July 1 to July 31, 2015.

Wrapping Up

The first step in implementing a successful Twitter campaign is to set a realistic goal. This goal (or goals) will help outline a clear expectation of how to measure success at the end of the campaign. Outlining goals and benchmarking performance before launching a campaign ensures that you can easily monitor its impact. This is the key to implementing a compelling and strategic Twitter campaign.