Social media is one of the very best ways to find and engage with customers online, but how you go about participating in social media will determine your success. In this post, we’ll take a high-level view of social media strategy and how you can develop one to best serve your audience, and your purpose.

Finding Your Audience

Pinterest, Tumblr, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube… it’s enough to make your head spin. Busy companies have enough on their hands before they consider a single social network, much less seven. Luckily, this is the first tenant of social media strategy – you don’t have to be everywhere. You do have to be where your audience is.

So, before you go any further, you have to take a step back and consider who your audience is and where they might live online.

If you are largely B-to-B, consider a handful of social channels including LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube and SlideShare.

If you are B-to-C you’ve got some additional thinking to do. If, for example, your audience skews younger, YouTube, Tumblr and Instagram should be high on your list. If you’re targeting moms, Facebook and Pinterest are your new best friends.

You see how this works?

Feeling Your Way Around

Once you’ve figured where you should concentrate your energies, it’s time to focus on how.

Before you create your page, it’s important to study the social customs particular to the network. Specifically, what can you do there, and what should you do there?

Sure, you can use Pinterest to post a bunch of product photos with links back to your site, but should you? Probably not. Instead, take a look how successful companies use the channel. Look at case studies and evaluate the social tendencies of the companies that you admire.

Pinterest has a few great case studies on their tools for business page. Take a look, for example, how Petplan Insurance – a company without product photos – perfectly engaged their audience while characterizing their brand.

Going “All In”

Now it’s time for the real social media strategy – precisely how will you characterize your brand? Start to brainstorm categories for the types of content you will offer your users. Will you post inspirational quotes? Links to helpful content? Instructional videos? Infographics?

Once you’ve got your list of categories, begin to plan your social media content by creating a calendar in an Excel spreadsheet. Include the date of publication, the textual post, and the image or files needed. You can use a free tool like Hootsuite to schedule your posts. That way, you can have your foundational social content covered for a month or two at a time.

The rest of your content will come from daily interactions with users. This should include liking or sharing the content of the users you follow, and responding to your users’ questions or concerns.

Rising to the Occasion

Participation in social media is, ultimately, a customer service opportunity. Once they’re on social media, companies have a responsibility to effectively respond to their customers’ questions and concerns. Doing so publically, and with limited character count, can be tricky.

In general, it’s a good idea to have a plan in place for customer feedback – both positive and negative. To ensure that you’re providing good customer service, make sure you have a dedicated person (or people) in charge of monitoring your social media feeds for activity. This way, when someone interacts with your brand, you can respond swiftly and appropriately.

Facebook launches a new local business tool that allows a user to search for local businesses with their mobile application.  The biggest difference with this new app is that it features their “Friends” recommendations.

The new feature is only available on mobile applications and the goal is to focus on reviews, check-ins, and ratings by user’s “Friends” list.  This allows for a much more unique customer experience as the searcher will know exactly who gave the reviews and what their “Friends” thought of the experience at the local establishment.  This application is only available on Facebook’s mobile platform and not the desktop version.

This is a huge opportunity for local businesses to establish their brands within a community.  By receiving reviews from customers that will directly influence other customers, it will help them gain maximum exposure.  The only thing required to be able to use the Nearby feature is to have a Facebook page, as the feature does not openly use data on the web.

Here are some tips from Facebook on how to promote your business within Nearby:

1. Update your page’s basic information, including address, hours of business, phone number, and details about your product/service.
2. Update your Category – Example:  If you’re a restaurant, make sure you select the appropriate category in order for Nearby to allow your business to be found appropriately.
3. Encourage Friends/Fans to “like”, “check-in”, ratings, and recommendations

At this time, the Nearby feature is completely free and automatically indexes all business that have pages on Facebook.

Google recently added a very Facebook-like feature to its burgeoning social network – Google+ Communities. Almost immediately, small, intensely-focused communities starting sprouting up across the network. Because these communities are full of highly-engaged early adopters, there’s a huge opportunity to use them to connect with influencers in your niche.

The best way to go about this is to join the communities that are relevant to your field, and take an active role in them – creating community-specific content just as you would for your social media profile.

Posts that work best are those that take an active, sincere interest in what you’re audience has to say. You can poll your audience, asking advice based on their experience and perspectives, or propose hangouts and plan events with community members.

This can be especially useful as part of a larger campaign designed to build relationships with social media influencers in your niche.

But make sure not to come on too strong. Because these communities are relatively small, you want to make sure not to overwhelm the feed. The appearance of spamming will not only turn current members off to your brand, it will inhibit the growth of the community.

The best way to behave within Google+ Communities is how you would in real life, with earnest sincerity and interest for what your target audience has to say.

Recently Facebook upped the ante on local search with its release of an updated iOS and Android app with a beefed-up Facebook Nearby.

Previously, Facebook’s Nearby function let users see where their friends had checked in. With this most recent update, users can now search local businesses by name or category. But landing on the result pages is more complicated than simply being “nearby.”

Because the algorithm that determines what shows up on the Nearby results page is largely dependent upon Facebook data, user check-ins and interactions, which now include star ratings, have a lot to do with the results. Facebook says results will get even more personalized when users check into and rate businesses.

In order to ensure you don’t get lost in the proverbial shuffle, it’s important to optimize your Facebook page for this new stage in local search.

First and foremost, if you don’t have a Facebook page, get one. Facebook is vying to become its own ecosystem. Companies that don’t exist within the ecosystem simply won’t exist for a key demographic of users who turn to Facebook for everything from finding a restaurant to viewing friend’s vacation photos.

Next, optimize the content on your About section. Include descriptive, keyword-optimized language, as well as all of your pertinent business information, including your location, services and hours of operation. While you’re at it, make sure your business is being listed under the correct category. If you’re not, you’ll have a much harder time showing up in relevant search results.

Finally, and most importantly, encourage Facebook fans to interact with your page by checking in and rating your page. The more popular your business appears, the better chance you’ll have showing up in these newest of search results.

Just like in real life, there are things we can do on social media to alienate people. If you’re a chronic over-sharer, are offensive, or fail to make personal connections with your followers, you may get unfriended, says a new report from SocialVibe.

Among SocialVibe’s findings:

• 33% of users unfollowed brands that posted too many updates

• 22% of users did so because their values and/or content differed from the users’ original perception

• 19% did so because they didn’t find value in remaining connected

• 9% did so after signing up through an ad then changing their minds

How many updates are too many? That’s a little hard to pin down. SocialVibe reports that 17% of users checked for brand updates every day, while 23% checked at least once a week.

Ideally, you should be posting somewhere between these two extremes, say 3-5 times a week.

More important than how often you post updates, though, is what you’re saying.

People follow brands for updates, sure, but between true “updates” it’s important to stay connected with content that is informative, helpful and engaging. Content that reinforces the ideas behind your brand, and reminds users why they follow you in the first place, is ideal.

Just make sure that you’re content isn’t too aggressive or sales-focused. If you had a friend who clogged your timeline with incessant self-promotional messages, you would unfriend them too.

It would seem the business community is not using their Facebook pages effectively – or at all. A new study by Recommend.ly, a social media analytics company, notes that two-thirds of business pages are inactive. Among those, 63.9% have no cover photo, 70% are updated zero times a month, and 83.4% have never participated in a conversation.

Is your Facebook business page among the wayward majority? If so, it’s time to get your social mojo back.

The best way to do this is to change your perspective.

Social media marketing does not have to be the oft-ignored elephant in the room. And you do not need to have a staff member 100% dedicated to social tasks in order to achieve success. All you have to do is designate someone to take the reins.

One way to do this is to rotate the responsibility. If you have a staff of twelve, for example, have each person take over social media marketing for a month. To maintain consistency, ask each person to submit a content calendar for approval beforehand.

Give your staff an idea of what should be on the calendar by taking the lead.

To start, take a look at what you’re already doing that may be relevant to your Facebook fans and Twitter followers. This includes:

• Sales and promotions

• Blog posts

• New products or service lines

Then, beef up your calendar by adding:

• Quick, engaging, educational information about your products or services

• Relevant industry information

• Links to other relevant topics of interest

Once you’ve got your calendar, schedule your posts with a free tool like HootSuite, or use the Facebook scheduler.

While tools like HootSuite are great for set-it-and-forget-it social media management, it’s important to remember that social media is about engagement. Make sure whoever is managing your social media efforts builds time into their calendars to check your page for fan posts. And, when a fan leaves a post, respond to it! They don’t call it social for nothing.

This week, Facebook announced the launch of Facebook Collections, a Pinterest-Inspired social shopping feature aimed at giving advertisers another avenue to reach Facebook’s 800 million active users.

And Facebook Collections isn’t the only social foray into e-commerce. Sites like Fancy and ShopStyle are upping the ante when it comes to engaging users – and their credit cards.

While ShopStyle feels more artistic and aspirational in nature, allowing its users to play the role of fashion editors (or at least their interns), building lookbooks based around certain themes, trends or color schemes, Fancy brings the visual aesthetic of Pinterest fully into the territory of e-commerce, allowing users to “fancy” various products with the option to buy them.

This is exactly what Facebook is setting out to do with its Collections feature. While only select advertisers are in at the onset - Pottery Barn, Victoria’s Secret, Michael Kors, Neiman Marcus, and Fab.com among them – if user’s buy into the concept, advertisers of all stripes could soon be adding their creative to Facebook Collections.

While these early advertisers aren’t paying anything to be involved – and Facebook isn’t taking a cut of the purchase price – you can be sure that Facebook Collections will come at a price to advertisers eventually. Once, of course, Facebook has the data to backup whatever revenue model they roll out.

As for other social shopping sites, their revenue models look more like affiliate marketing models than anything else – which is good for advertisers, who get brand exposure while only having to pay an affiliate-style finder’s fee once a user clicks “buy.”

There’s been a lot of talk in the last year or so about Pinterest, the hottest social media site going. And though marketers have been quick to catch on, many are still not using Pinterest effectively. This post will discuss how businesses can use Pinterest to drive traffic and inspire brand loyalty.

Just in case you’ve never dipped your toe in the pool that is Pinterest, here is a primer: Pinterest is a social media site wherein users create pinboards around certain topics or themes. Like Twitter and Facebook, users can follow brands or “pinners” that they like. They can also “like” individual pins and follow individual pinboards.

Probably the best thing about Pinterest, for businesses, is that pins can be “repinned,” or repurposed, for other pinboards – creating an opportunity for an image to be widely shared across the site.

While an audience might come to Twitter for information, they’re coming to Pinterest for inspiration. Your task as a marketer is to inspire the image-hungry Pinterest audience to “like” and share your images. You can do this by creating clean, aesthetically pleasing, pins and pinboards.

But be careful: Pinterest is about fun, not shopping. By joining in on the fun, you can encourage interest in your brand, drive traffic to your site, generate leads, and inspire brand loyalty.

The first instinct companies have regarding Pinterest is to create 100% product-centric pinboards. This will likely backfire. If your pinboards look too much like your website, users have little reason to follow; if they want to see your images, they can just go to your website.

Your task instead is to be creative and to diversify.

Look, for example, at the pinboards created by the clothing company Madewell.

While some of Madewell’s pinboards are product-heavy, others celebrate things they love, like fun prints (on the pinboard Print, Pattern, Repeat) cool designs (on the pinboard Visual Happiness) and even books (on the pinboard What We’re Reading). Here, Madewell isn’t just creating sales tools, they’re creating inspiring pinboards that identify their brand with specific ideas.

You can do the same for your brand by being creative, and considering the many visual spinoffs or offshoots from your central product. Consider, for example, the colors, seasons, locations, events, people, and ideas you want associated with your brand.

Like all social media platforms, Pinterest is not a one-way conversation. To use Pinterest effectively, businesses should allocate the resources to use Pinterest as an open channel of communication – repinning others’ images and following other brands and users when appropriate. The idea here is to align your brand with brands and users that are similar in mood and aesthetics – creating connections in users’ minds between your brand and brands they know and love.

Why else would Madewell tell the world they’re reading Jane Austen?

Businesses that are B2B marketers should consider the value of LinkedIn as a growing professional network for its potential to generate leads.  A recent infographic published by LinkedIn marketing, shows that LinkedIn generated 212 million business leads in the U.S. for 2011. They found that 46% of the audience follows industry discussions and 43% use LinkedIn to learn about companies.  It’s easy to make a case for participating in the network, when you consider that 60+ million U.S. members use LinkedIn as a professional resource. If you already have a LinkedIn company page, the next step is optimizing it.

You can optimize your LinkedIn Company page with the following features:

• Add Unique SEO Copy - Create unique, keyword rich copy for the Company Overview, Description, Products/Services, Promotions, and Status Update sections.

• Optimize Your Page Design - Create designs for up to three banners that include strong calls to action and visually support your business model. Include a Thumbnail on each Product/Service listed; up to 5 can be featured. Include a YouTube video about the Product/Service on each landing page. Add copy for a promotion about  to the service,  that links to your website.

• Optimize Individual Profiles - Each company page connects to an individual profile, and more than one profile can be linked with the page as a contact resource. Each optimized profile can create and participate in Groups, Answers, Discussions, and Add Events.

• Target Audiences - Once the LinkedIn “default” Company Page is complete; you can duplicate it and adapt the content toward target audiences. You may choose to alter your page’s banner design, featured services, and text that will only show for specific designated page filters. This will ensure that the customized company pages are specific to the industry, job function, geography, etc. of your choice.

These tips can be used to improve your LinkedIn Company Page, in order to make it more effective in generating traffic to your website and capturing leads. If you are interested in pursuing this type of optimization, but don’t have the internal resources to accomplish the outlined tasks, you should contact us for information about our LinkedIn Optimizer program.

You already know that social media is a great way to drive web traffic and stay in front of your core audience. But it’s also a great way to drive traffic to your brick-and-mortar location. By using Yelp and Google+ Local, businesses can connect with customers and would-be customers where they live online.

Let’s start with Yelp. While businesses cannot set up their own pages in Yelp – businesses must first be reviewed by “Yelpers” – they can unlock those pages. Unlocking your page(s) in Yelp lets you take a modicum of control of your Yelp page. You won’t be able to delete negative reviews, but you will be able to respond to reviews – both positive and negative.

With an unlocked Yelp page you can also:

• Track visits to your Yelp page.

• Add photos of your business.

• Create Groupon-like Deals through Yelp.

• Advertise your business on Yelp.

Unlocking your Yelp page helps you to characterize your business in your own words (and with your own images). It also gives you a powerful “in” with a large number of web users who are passionate about shopping local – and spreading the word.

Google+ Local is a different story entirely. The reincarnation of Google Places, Google+ Local is like a locally-optimized Facebook page for businesses. What’s best, Google+ Local pages show up in the search engine results. Keep your Google+ Local page updated with fresh content and promotions, and you’ll be sure to see increased traffic to both your website and your brick-and-mortar.

Just remember that social continues IRL (in real life). If a customer who found you through social has a negative experience in your store, you can bet they’re going to Yelp about it.