THE NEW year brings about a time of making plans and resolutions. It’s a time to set budgets and plan trips. Goals are set with renewed inspiration and dedication to the many goals that have made their way to our back burners — social media may be one of them.

Here I provide three steps for keeping your social media resolutions in 2017.

1 RESOLVE TO POST DAILY

Gym memberships nearly double around the new year. Why? People are making New Year’s resolutions to get, and stay, healthy. Many will fail to keep their resolutions because they don’t make going to the gym a habit.

For social media, get into the habit. Here is the catch: To be habitual, you have to make it part of your daily routine; and my suggestion is to make it one of the first items on your daily to-do list.

2 SET GOALS

It is often said that setting a goal is the first step to success. A social media goal can be something as simple as: “Obtain x amount of new fans or followers each month.” Since that number will vary, one might want to look at the last several months of statistics to determine the typical amount of growth; then set an attainable goal.

For example, if you were adding 10 fans a month, set a goal of 20, and work toward that. This will involve some research on ways to acquire those fans. You might also want to set a goal of doing an hour a week of social media studying, so you learn techniques required to accomplish your goal.

3 PLAN

An absolutely fantastic way to strengthen your social media presence is to develop your own, highly relevant content, and create recurring posts. Consider identifying the top five products and services for which patients are constantly praising you. Then, create a post for each of those topics, and schedule one per day. This allows your most important marketing messages to be regularly delivered to current and prospective patients.

Once you have one post for each praise item you identified, work to develop three more for each of those five things. The goal is to have one of those posts automatically appear each day.

How does one get those posts to automate? The answer is a social media management application, of which there are many, including HootSuite, Buffer and EveryPost. What I’ve found to work well is Post Planner. Here is an example: Myopia control is one of our praiseworthy topics. (See screenshot below.)

BEGIN, AGAIN

The promise of the new year gives us hope that it will be different. Follow these three steps to ensure you at least get started off on the right foot. OM

DR. BAZAN is founder of Park Slope Eye, in Brooklyn, N.Y. He is a member of the AOA, NYSOA and the American Academy of Orthokeratology & Myopia Control. In 2014, he received financial compensation for services from Allergan, Bausch + Lomb, Vision Service Plan, Luxottica, The Vision Council and Foster Grant.