So many businessess are scrambling to figure out how to take advantage of social media marketing. And why not it is obvious that using tools like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and Twitter have proven to be super profitable.  But before you get knee deep in social media overwhelm make sure to create a marketing plan for your social media campaign. 

Because social media tools have become so comprehensive and abundant your planning should be detailed, focused and requires as much attention as your solo business and marketing plans. if you know exactly what you want to achieve you can use these question guidelines to begin the planning process but if you feel you need more guidance you can use a company to develop and even impliment your Social Media Strategy!

Step 1:  Who is your ideal customer?
-What do your customers want?
-Who buys your biggest valued product or service?

Step 2: Where are your existing customers Online?
-Find out where your existing customers are by sending a social media newsletter and inviting your customers to tell you where they social network.
-Seeing where the majority of your customers network online will queue you in to the networks you need to be actively apart of.

Step 3:  How can you integrate Social Media into what you are already doing?
- Where on your website will you ask customers or potential customers to reach out to you on your profiles?
-Looking at all the tools you use can you include a link to connect your profiles?
-Do you write articles - can you add a social bookmarking link to it - have you taken advantage of RSS feeds?

Step 4: Who is your Social Media Support Team?
- Do you have a team member that REALLY knows the ins and outs of social media?
-Do you and your team members know the rules of social media - yes there are rules and not following them can get you kicked out of certain sites or create a terrible online reputation for your business!
-You can't do it all alone but you must share the responsiblity - for an organic and positive branding experience you should create weekly social media submission plan with a  mixture of updates, quotes, tips and articles containing relevant to your industry, subject matter.

Step 5: What's working and what's a waste of time?
-To really know where your efforts lead to the most traffic and eventually sales you will need to have a few traffic reporting tools in place.
-Google Analytics is a comprehensive and free way to track your traffic.
-To track a specific url or profile campaign you can create an ad tracker link that gives you statistics based on a specific url. You can create this link  in the popular Shopping Cart System, Kick Start Cart.