Sarah Malcolm is the Founder of Quiet Valor, an Ad Agency servicing companies within the Tech, BioTech and Healthcare Innovation space.
getty
We typically use the close of one year and the start of the next to reflect on our past 12 months, decade, or lifetimes. Taking this time to reflect and set new goals is incredibly important to our personal journeys, but self-reflection is not just for your life. Making time to reflect on our businesses enables us to appreciate our journey and better identify growth opportunities.
Most brands use the year’s end to review things like brand strategy, budget, and marketing performance. Those are definitely important for measuring, understanding and setting goals for your business performance. But when we focus only on the metrics, we tend to miss out on the stories behind them. Take off your analytical hat for just a moment. The story of what happened to your brand this year is worth a look.
Social Media Is Your Self-Reflection Journal
When scrolling through my notifications, I got the “This Year in Memories” notice off social. Normally, I gloss over the alert, but this time, I started thinking.
Our social media posts act like an unofficial, abstract journal. If you pay close attention, those posts have a lot of information we could learn from.
Why not use social media to reflect on your business?
MORE FOR YOU
The reason for this is twofold.
First, when you look at the data aspect of your social media performance, the numbers only tell part of the story about what went right and what went wrong.
Those metrics show the posts your audience engaged with the most, which created the most click-throughs, which had zero engagement. Yes, you can learn some lessons from the data about what kind of content resonates with your audience and what doesn’t. It is valuable to see that one particular post style gained more click-throughs or that your videos did extremely well this year.
But take it one step further. Ask: why did you create that post in that way at that time? What was happening in your business?
Perhaps you stopped making videos because you felt that the time involved in making them would be spent better elsewhere. Maybe the posts pushing hard on the sales reflected some lean months in your business.
Second, the heart of our work is people and communicating with those people. Social media is that record of how we impacted our respective communities during the year. Data doesn’t show how we spoke or what we said.
Scroll through the library of your posts to see how your business evolved over the year. Can you see a point where your brand pivoted to meet customer needs better? Or the moment when growth started to happen? Can you find when you faced some challenges and how you responded? What about real moments when your work made an impact?
Paging through our history allows us to discover how far we’ve come and to cherish the strides we’ve made. I bet your 2020 looks pretty interesting. How do those posts you’re planning for 2021 look different from 2020?
What Are You Going to Gain From Self-Reflection?
Most days, we live in the trenches. You get so busy that you can’t find your glasses until someone points out you’re wearing them. I think we’ve all found ourselves going down a rabbit hole of doing things that don’t matter to the bottom line. It happens when we lose sight of the end goal.
Self-reflection is an opportunity to step back and breathe. When you take yourself out of the day-to-day actions of running a brand, you see the big picture again. You need this moment to make sure you are still focused on goals and growth.
How to Reflect
Reserve a time when you will not be interrupted by other business tasks. Find a quiet and calm place where you will not be disturbed by email and text notifications. Turn them off for your self-reflection time.
Pull the data or branding documents that you might want handy to answer some questions. Look at the information with no judgments or preconceived notions about what you will see.
Start scrolling through your social media feed. Have a place for writing reflections. Make anecdotal notes on what catches your attention or thoughts you have as you see the posts. Feel free to ask questions that you want to explore later.
If you are familiar with a SWOT analysis, apply its principles to looking at your social media posts. Some things you may want to ask:
• Is social media marketing helping our business right now? Will it help in the future?
• What are the things our social media is doing well?
• Is there anything holding us back from doing more with social media?
• What is the brand I see reflected in the social media posts?
• What kind of person are the social media posts talking to?
• What’s different in our posts from the start to the middle to the end of the year?
Answering these questions enhances your understanding of how your social media work impacts your brand-building and business’s bottom line.
A Self-Reflection Habit
If you stagnate, you fail. Get into the habit of reviewing your budget and growth metrics, plus all of the work you have done for your brand.
Social media is how you present to the world. Reflect on what you are creating; it will give you a deeper appreciation of the journey while providing insights for the road forward.
Forbes Agency Council is an invitation-only community for executives in successful public relations, media strategy, creative and advertising agencies. Do I qualify?
Go to Source
Author: Sarah Malcolm, Forbes Councils Member
