First of all, you will need a social media strategy or a clearly stated plan that identifies what you hope to achieve with social media.
With Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn, you may be interacting with people where the goal is not to drive them back to your website but, in fact, to develop relationships with them and your brand.
However, you can still gain customers and use direct response on social media, but in the form of advertising. Facebook has a fantastic advertising program that allows you to target very specific demographics including age, sex, geographic location and interests.
Twitter’s promoted tweets also allow you to expand your reach on Twitter beyond the audience that follows you. LinkedIn also has terrific advertising options that focus on business-to-business advertising and, of course, Google and YouTube have very advanced advertising opportunities that can help deliver customers to your door.
Your social media strategy will need to have content creation as a major part of it and you will need to have resources producing some or all of the following; blog posts, tweets, Facebook updates, videos, photo galleries.
You will also need a listening strategy to monitor who is talking about your business and/or industry and identify who you should be engaging and interacting with on social media. Beyond Google Analytics, you will want to use a social media monitoring tool like Radian6.
In my opinion, you need to have a presence on all social media channels but how much time and resources you need to allocate is the real question. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn are key and perhaps Pinterest as well. •
