Make Your Social Media Efforts Successful for Your Business

While many businesses are looking at social media as a viable piece of their marketing package, it is still very common for these businesses to enter this realm without thinking about how they are going to actually implement it. Many of these businesses try to treat social media for their business the same as they treat it for their personal profiles. That will not work.

To be successful in social media, you first need to define what you want to accomplish. If you don't have a target to aim for, then how do you know that what you are doing is actually working? If you fail to define goals that you want to reach, then you will basically start shooting randomly into cyberspace with hopes that something hits.

Along with your goals, you need to define the criteria that must be met in order to determine when you have reached your goal. This will be obvious to anyone that works in marketing, but many small businesses are largely one-man shows. Take a little bit of time to think about what would be a good indicator of reaching a goal. Make sure that the criteria you are trying to meet is traced back to your social media marketing efforts. If you reach your goal, but social media didn't accomplish it, then you should either find what you need to improve your effort or drop social media from that part of your business altogether.

As you are defining the criteria to be met when you reach your goals, define subsets of criteria that must be met along the way. For example, imagine you have a product that you are wanting to heavily market over the next 6 months. You decide to implement a social media strategy into your overall plan. If you only define the criteria for the goal, you won't know for 6 months if your efforts are actually providing a return. If you define criteria that must be met along the way (and leave room for some fudging, since nothing ever goes perfectly), then you can tell one or two months in whether something needs to be adjusted or dropped before spending time and effort that isn't worth it.

Finally, make sure you have the right tools so that you can tell what efforts are paying off. Use a tool like Seesmic to manage your Twitter and Facebook accounts. Use the Google Analytics on your website to see where those leads are coming from. Use the Google URL Builder to create links that define the sources that you control so that you can see what is really going on in Google Analytics. Use a URL shortening service such as bit.ly for posting trackable short links on Twitter and Facebook.