Social media fever has struck and has settled in for keeps.
You know it has.
Every second PC screen you pass has the unmistakable blue banner plastered across the top.
Everyone seems to have an online presence these days and if your business hasn't, it should.
But, you need to go in with a plan.
First and foremost, you need to know why you want to take the plunge.
Too many businesses go straight into setting up their respective social accounts and blog, but have limited vision of what they want to achieve by doing so.
It's all a little Lemming-esque.
Taking some time to develop a strategy will give you a major advantage.
All social media strategy should be rooted in the fact that social media is about conversations, interaction and the ability to portray a human personality.
From this base, you can customise your plan to achieve your goals.
If your aim is to provide a feedback forum for your customer base, link as much information as possible to your profiles.
Search the net for anywhere else that users are commenting or mentioning your brand and get involved.
Link conversations from other forums to your profile to build a center point where people know they can come for the best response to their queries on your brand and products.
An absolute must is to action every comment that you receive as quickly as possible and follow through all conversations to their end.
To build your physical sales, a generous amount of time needs to be invested in your social media strategy to first build your following.
The first two years of your campaign may not bear any fruits, but this should be seen as an essential stage in the maturity of your profile.
Once you have a quality community presence, you should focus on content that will have the greatest benefit in providing a link to your company or will have the greatest viral effect in your community.
Content must be engaging and fresh or it will be skipped over.
Remember, there is a hell of a lot of information out there for your potential customers to digest, yours must stand out and drive interest back to your brand.
On the other hand, if you want to build awareness of your brand, you will need to ensure your online reputation is immaculate.
You are human (and your profile should reflect this also) so people will forgive mistakes, but the way you handle your mistakes will affect your profile more than anything else in social media.
Provide as much relevant and interesting information to your community as possible about events and news regarding your business.
In return for your community digesting your content and passing it on, make sure that you forward links and content from others users too.
In this way your reputation will echo your brand as one that is in touch with the community at large and respects its potential customer base.
And anything that gains respect in social media circles (while providing interesting content) has the best chance of gaining a huge following.
Ideally, most social media marketing campaigns will want to achieve all of the above outcomes.
But by focussing on them as different aspects, you can ensure that you are constructing a balanced profile and maximizing potential for success.