I call them the “ATES” of Successful Social Media Marketing and I have listed the best and worst of them below: 

The 4 Best ATES – Do These 

LocATE – The first thing any person or business needs to do when deciding on a social media strategy is decide who you are trying to communicate with.  Will it be more social or business oriented, male or female, young or old, etc.  From a purely business standpoint, deciding on your “target market” will point in the right direction on which social media sites to spend your time on. 

Once you decide that, you need to then try to find the right people, conversations and groups to engage.  For example, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter all have internal search functions that can help you locate people with specific backgrounds, interests and even geographic locations. Once you find a person or group of interest, simply follow, connect or befriend them. 

ParticipATE – Making friends online is not much different than making them in person.  The more you put into any type of relationship, the more you’ll get out of it.  Translation…make sure you spend the time to nurture your “friendships.”  How?  Join in the conversation – give advice, feedback, useful information, answer and ask questions, re-tweet, give thumbs up, bookmark pages, leave comments on posts, etc.  These are not hard to do and don’t take a lot of time, but can really help you gain respect within your “community.” 

AllocATE – This really goes hand in hand with participation.  You need to allocate enough time to your social media effort in order for it to give you whatever results you are looking for.  Social media is a courtship not a “one-night stand.”  I know many people are concerned that it can take up too much time, but that can only happens if you let it. 

There are ways to systemize and automate the process but not the message.  There are ready available tools and applications that can help you and many of them are free.  These include such things as TweetLater, TweetDeck, Ping.fm, Friendfeed and many more.  You might also want to consider using Virtual Assitants (VAs) to manage some of your social media tasks.  Just remember, there is only one you and you should never outsource your own “voice.”  

IntegrATE – If you are going to use social media as part of your marketing, you need to be sure to integrate it into your overall marketing plan.  Social media should be in addition to, not instead of other forms of marketing.  Fast and easy ways to get started?  Place social site widgets on your blogs, websites and e-mail signatures.  Use Twitter as a way of answering consumer questions or Facebook as a way of announcing live events or webinars.  Uploading short videos to YouTube or staring a Blog are both things that you can do for free but can drive a ton of traffic to your business. 

The 4 Worst ATES – Don’t Do These 

DominATE  Social networking is not about being the life of the party and dominating the conversation.  Posting 50 tweets in 5 minutes to take up all the space on the screen to get noticed will certainly do so, but you’ll also loose followers.  Good friends listen to others and don’t dominate the conversation.  

AlienATE – Goes hand in hand with dominating the conversation.  In this case I am talking about social networkers that are only there to sell, sell, sell.  All their messages are “buy this me and you’ll get rich” oriented.  If every conversation you participate in is about you and what you have to sell, make no mistake, you will alienate your friends and lose followers.  Can you make posts and comments about your products and services?  Of course, just don’t make them the only thing you ever post and post them infrequently. 

ProcrastinATE - If you don’t have a social media marketing strategy, what are you waiting for.  Social media is NOT a fad and many of your competitors are already engaging with your customers and prospects.  You don’t have to be an expert to at least get started.  Sign up for a Twitter and Facebook account and observe what others are doing.  Get educated on the basics and progress from there.  You can get my free e-book “7 Steps to Social Media Success” to get you started. 

ComplicATE:  Some people get so overwhelmed with social media that they do nothing.  You talk to one person and they love Ning, Plaxo and StumbleUpon.  You talk to others and they swear by FastPitch, MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn.  Which are the best for you?  The ones where your potential clients, friends or fans with mutual interests hang out.  Go where your clients, customers and prospects are. 

It’s not about quantity so much as it is quality.  It’s better to really engage in a few strategic sites and do it well, than have dozens of sites and never engage in any. 

For more information on how you can integrate social media into your current marketing efforts go to http://www.streetsmartsalesandmarketing.com/SocialMedia.htm 

To Your Social Media Success,

Dave