Social media is changing the way businesses can communicate with their customers. Social media offers opportunities to build relationships, build brand loyalty, and get people more engaged with your company and product or services.

Social media usage by small business doubled in 2009 and continued to rapidly rise in 2010. 80% of them already have a page on Facebook and post status updates on that page. More than 50% monitor Internet chatter about their company.

Social Media Platforms

There are many social media platforms that are available. Your industry and your customers will determine which platforms will be your best starting points.

Business-to-business will tend to do best on business social media platforms like LinkedIn.com. But you won’t find many opportunities to engage with B2C customers on that platform.

Facebook primarily draws consumers and at the moment, there are not many opportunities to engage in B2B SMM on that platform, though that may change in time.

Twitter currently provides ways to target B2B and B2C customers but not every business can show a strong ROI from the efforts required for Twitter.

Develop a Social Media Strategy

Take a look at what your competition is doing with social media. Are they using it at all? If so, are they using it in a way that’s compelling?

How are your customers and potential customers already using social media? Are they engaged with it? Do they walk into your place of business with their smart phone in their hand?

How much is your brand being talked about online? There are software applications and companies devoted to monitoring your brand reputation online, but you can use Google’s search engine alerts to get a quick check on this.

What will your Key Performance Indicators (KPI) be? What do you hope to accomplish with your social media campaigns?

The answers to these questions will depend on your industry, your customer, and your goals.

6 Steps towards a Social Media Strategy

1. Define goals and objectives. Just putting up a Facebook page isn’t a social media strategy even if it might be a good starting point.

2. Create measurable metrics that are in alignment with your goals and objectives.

3. Engage. Build relationships. Social media is not about shoving advertisements at people. Whether it’s engaging with your customers or fans on Facebook or engaging in conversation on industry relevant or customer-relevant blogs and forums, talk with people. Don’t just tout your brand, but engage in meaningful dialog in order to become a trusted resource.

4. Create engaging content. Give your social media campaigns information that people want to seek out and want to talk about. Similarly to the advice to engage with people, you also need to be engaging. Encourage your network to "Like" your content and to share it with their friends.

5. Measure your results.

6. Fine tune your social media strategy based on your results.

One of the things that make social media marketing so useful is that feedback cycles occur rapidly. Your strategy may start out as a stab in the dark, but you should be able to quickly fine tune your campaign based on the metrics that you’ve established to measure your Key Performance Indicators. You can rapidly change your strategy as you find out what is and isn’t working for your business.

Given how new social media marketing is, it’s often best to hire a consultant to help you get your new campaign off to the best start.