Today, if your brand isn’t on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and the like, you’re going to be out of the loop and left behind. You’re going to be left in the wake of other brands’ success.

So maybe it’s time for you to jump on the bandwagon. You need to create your Facebook page, start a blog, and create a video for YouTube right now…

Or wait a minute.

Is throwing yourself head on to the oncoming train that’s social media really the best thing to do? Should you just start signing up for all these accounts without considering what’s best for your small business brand?

Of course not.

This is why it’s essential for you to have a social media process. As with any kind of marketing strategy or campaign you’re planning to utilize, you must first understand why you’re doing it and what your goals are in using it, before going ahead with implementation.

This is the reason why some brands fail in their social marketing strategy. It’s because they never had a social media process to guide them. They simply decided to get in while ahead, but they didn’t really have a clear goal on what they wanted to accomplish using these platforms.

So before you can start creating buzz in your social marketing, here are some things you should do:

Review your business goals

Before you can create a social media process, it’s important that you review your business goals. What do you want to achieve in social media? Do you want to build brand awareness, create conversation, generate leads, or sell products?

Remember though that social media is primarily for connecting with your audience, and not for selling. If you do hard selling in different social media accounts, you just might drive people away.

Consider the platforms available

Though you may think it would be better for your small business to utilize all the social media platforms available to you, this may become time-consuming and cost-ineffective in the long run.

Instead, it is far better for you to focus on one or two platforms where you think most of your audience are in. This enables you to really target your audience and connect with them.

For example, if you’re a photographer, it may be more worthwhile for you to be on Flickr compared to YouTube or you might have concerns over copyright and want to review the platform terms of service. Perhaps a site like Deviant Art suits you better? Or if you’re a professional looking for clients, LinkedIn may be the better choice compared to Facebook.

Understand the platform you’ve chosen

You’re not going to be successful in your social marketing if you don’t understand the platform you’ve chosen. Once you’ve determined what platforms suit your brand best, you need to study them and understand how best to engage your audience using them.

One of the worst things you can do for your small business brand is to botch up your social marketing presence because you don’t understand the platform you’re using. So study it first before jumping in.

Remember to measure

Now that you’re ready to start your social marketing campaign, it’s also important to determine what you’re going to measure. How are you going to measure the success of your campaign? If you aren’t measuring it, then how will you know if your campaign is succeeding or not, if you’re getting a return in your investment?

There are many tools that can help you measure the success of your campaign. Google Alerts and Social Mention are some of the more commonly used ones. Of course my personal favorite that I’m an affiliate with is Sprout Social. So don’t forget to measure, since this is going to determine if you should soldier on with what you’re doing or if it’s time to re-evaluate and re-assess your campaign.

Without a social media process, your social marketing campaign will be destined for failure. So make sure that you start right. Plan ahead, and plan well. Don’t just jump into social media without reviewing your business goals, considering and understanding the platforms available to you, and having ways to measure your success.

Using social media is a great way to create buzz around your brand, but without a process, your small business brand isn’t going to go far.

Social media marketing is one of the top priorities for businesses with an online presence in 2009, new research indicates. 

A major benefit to this type of marketing is it costs nothing to join and this in comparison to other traditional and sometimes costly marketing techniques that can leave you paying out far more than you ever get in.  What you are basically doing with social marketing is building on the back of your own network of contacts and clients and using that network to build your campaign.

The main social media sites (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, YouTube etc) are all free and are surprisingly simple to manage and maintain.  Alongside these sits blogging and article writing.  Things you can do with these networking opportunities include:

• Publicity – social media allows people to share things of interest with everyone thus increasing the visibility of your business and yourself
• Support – joining like minded groups will allow you to share areas of common interest, assisting and helping others whilst seeking support in areas you feel a bit of guidance is needed.
• Integrate – add social media into your other marketing arenas

Manage

Simplicity is the key and all of these sites can be surprisingly simple to manage and maintain. The truly great thing about social media is that it allows you to enter the fray with as large or as small a commitment as you feel is appropriate to you.

Another great thing about social media is that it has the potential to offer your business a whole new world of opportunities that are affordable, measurable and on an international scale.

What not to do

• Don’t just go on there to actively promote your business, people will rapidly lose interest in you as to them you ‘have little or no value’.
• Never leave a derogatory or negative comment in response to someone, if you don’t agree or dislike what someone may have said, sometimes it’s best just to ignore.

What to do

•  Inject an element of fun, fear or controversy into your campaigns
•  Offer something unique that you either know or suspect people will find interesting
•  If you’re aiming at a younger audience, find out where your audience is and target them on their terms and in their language
• Aim to build an audience each and every time you start a new campaign.  With social media you can hang onto some of those people and build up your own community, one that ideally intersects around the world.

The key to maintaining and building that community is a blog for your business, and here are some of the benefits:

• Higher search engine rankings – generally speaking, a regular stream of new articles is considered appealing by the search engines, who will pay more attention to your blog or website, ranking you more highly accordingly. The more pages you write, the more there is to be found. However, it’s an exercise in quality not quantity!
• Gaining trust – by writing informative and authoritative articles, over time you’ll build confidence, trust, respect and a sense of “expert status” around your business.
• A sense of community – you’re engaging with your customers in a conversational style that’s difficult to replicate by other means. And by allowing people to comment on your articles, you’re encouraging those people to participate, giving them a reason to return. In simple terms, a blog is a great opportunity for you to quickly share ideas

In Summary

Social media marketing is the process of promoting your site or business through social media channels and it is a powerful strategy that will get you links, attention and massive amounts of traffic.  Social media marketing is an excellent way to get people to come into your site to take a look at at what you have to offer.  The actual overall process of this area of marketing is not difficult at all. 

It is one of the most effective tools for boosting your online business and making a presence for it in the web world. 

Social media marketing is one of the newest methods of marketing a web site and has evolved quickly into one of the most effective methods.