Businesses are embracing social media and social media marketing as part of their broader marketing strategies far more readily these days. This is encouraging to see, especially among corporates who are typically resistant to change and frequently have trouble adapting rather time-consuming and cumbersome bureaucratic processes to the relatively fast pace of the online environment.

Of course, there are challenges other than administration to overcome when it comes to social media. For a start, social media is about conversations and personalities. You are vying for your users’ attention – so if you don’t engage them with a really great personality or brand that they personally want to endorse – you’re going to get lost in the din and are losing out on potential “ambassadors”.

Social media has made the marketing maxim of telling believable stories even more important. One-way, push marketing communication is on its way out. This is now an attention economy, and in a world where time-starved customers are bombarded with marketing messages it’s hard to get through. Now that consumers can choose what they look at, do they want to look at and engage with you?

This buy-in is key to engaging with customers. Many would say that getting this kind of subscription comes down to authenticity and networking. This is true. However, to really get the most bang for your buck, the loop also needs to be closed when it comes to social media marketing and strategies need to be cleverly integrated across channels to create a ‘through-the-line’ approach that works.

This is the reason that many social media marketing campaigns are unsuccessful or not as effective as they could be. There needs to be not only follow-through, but also a cleverly integrated approach.

The easiest way to achieve this is by having a clear idea of where you want to go with your campaign – as well as define what your measurables are going to be before you start. It’s sometimes hard in some social media to predict exactly what will happen, as conversations tend to follow an organic flow. You can’t really force this. However, a clever social media marketer will be able to steer and lead conversations in such a way that they remain natural and unobtrusive.

Many web development and marketing companies now offer social media marketing as one of their services. While there are plenty of agencies and consultancies that do legitimately specialise in and have experience within the field, there are many who don’t. There are a number of common pit-falls – and where most fall short is in there execution and maintenance of these campaigns. It’s not just a case of creating a Facebook group and forgetting about it. The social media elements that one chooses to use need to be managed and maintained and relationships with customers need to be cultivated and grown.

What are the core factors in executing a successful social media marketing campaign?

First of all, decide what your story is. This is still at the core of effective marketing. Make sure it’s credible and one that your target market subscribe to. Make sure that you remain authentic.

Second, ensure that your goals and metrics are well defined. You need to have an idea of where you want to go with this campaign and how you intend to measure your success.

These two decisions will affect your third consideration – which is where you are going to find this audience. If you know who you’re trying to reach through social media – you’ll better be able to identify where they are online.

Finally, you need to be honest about whether your business is ready to be involved and invested. The process of social media marketing takes time and effort. You can’t just put up a Facebook fan page and create a Twitter account and call that a social media strategy. You need to ensure that you are invested. If you are not “socialising” though interaction and involvement with your community, you are not really present.

In this way, you will be able to listen to, respond to and influence your audience. When deciding to embark on a social media marketing strategy, it’s worth ensuring that whoever you choose to implement the campaign has the experience and foresight necessary to execute it fully and effectively.

AlterSage is an online marketing company based in Cape Town, South Africa. AlterSage specialises in creating and implementing bespoke online strategies for a range of clients from around the world. Services include social media marketing, pay per click campaign management and search engine optimisation.

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1. Become a search major ninja. You must search to be successful in social, and knowing all the specific Google operators can help you get to what you need for your marketing efforts fast (such as content creation that requires research).

2. Unfollow those who don’t add value or aren’t important to your network. This tip isn’t for a brand or company seeking to make themselves accessible to the world at large, but for you as a marketer personally. How many times have you logged into Twitter, Facebook or FriendFeed – even just after a few hours of being away – and felt totally lost in the conversation. Unless you’re going to devote your life to watching the stream, make sure that who you’re following is actually worth your time.

3. Unsubscribe to all RSS feeds that you won’t miss. RSS is the perfect, simple way to keep track of relevant feeds, but over time your reader can become bloated. We’ve all logged into reader and seen Google display the euphemistic “1,000+ unread items” before.
This isn’t very fun – so be sure to keep your subscription signal-to-noise ratio positive.

4. Learn to skim. As marketers, there just isn’t time to read everything fully. Learn to skim past the noise and recognize when there are conversations and content worth your time to read carefully. On the flip side, make your own content scanable to entice readers to skim. Done properly, this should increase engagement and draw people in deeper.

5. Establish a set of trusted sites to read frequently. No matter what niche you’re interested in, you absolutely must identify the trusted, valuable sites in that area. Read their content carefully, as in many cases, those at the top are the conversation starters for those in the tail. In other words: Following the leaders can keep you at the forefront of the greater conversation.

6. Audit your time. Calculate how much time you spend daily in different areas of the social web. It adds up, and no one is immune to losing time. Carefully audit just where your time is going and realign efforts to the areas that make a different in achieving objectives.

7. Automate where it makes sense, but do so carefully. Setting up feeds to auto-tweet when you add new content to your blog or share something in Google Reader may make sense. But careful not to automate things like direct messages, something that may irk those on the receiving end.

8. Analyze how people react to the content you create or share. Look at what content archetypes your community reacts to, learn from them, adjust and sharpen as you go forward.

9. Realize there is no information overload. Learn to navigate the unstoppable river of real-time information.

10. Aggregate social content about your company, brand or even yourself into a real-time feed using one of the many tools available to do this. Bring the relevant mentions to you instead of always searching for them.

11. Consolidate your network presence Keep your posts short and to the point.

12. Learn the ebbs and flows of content in a niche and what networks, sites and users matter. Get an understanding of how your corner of the web works, and in time you’ll develop an understanding for how it functions at the macro level.

13. Develop an efficient routine for your time spent in the social web. This will allow you to know how much time each set of tasks and updates take and allow you to become more efficient each day. With that said, as marketers it is also important to understand that we all use the web differently. So if you’re going to do this for efficiency’s sake, continue to explore other tools, trends and options. You can be efficient with your core functions but still experiment.

14. Make your processes simple. No one is going to argue against copying and pasting being the best social media tool. There’s a reason for that: It’s dead simple. Make your time spent on social media as a participant and contributor as simple as the idea of copy-pasting content.

15. Use only the essential tools. With a constant slew of new apps being developed, it’s easy for marketers to get shiny new object syndrome. And while you should be trying new things out, you should get to the point you’re only using the tools daily that are essential to your core purposes in the social web.

16. Don’t multitask. If you want to do things like develop killer blog content, you have to turn off Twitter, walk away from email and focus. Social media makes it all too easy to multitask, but the results of your efforts will be sub-par compared to those who focus.

17. Cross-link content sharing. Do things like sharing StumbleUpon or Digg links in Twitter – encourage users from one network to share content in another. Get creative with how you do this and make it subtle or even invisible.

18. Support imperfection. Part of social media means, well, being social. And our social interactions are by their very nature imperfect. Some of the best blogs on the planet are hardly perfect, but that’s not what makes them compelling.

19. Eliminate the grunt work. Identify where the valuable, creative opportunities are that resonate with your key audiences. Now focus there – the rest may be busy work that can be trimmed.

20. You must remember qualitity over quantity – more participation does not trump higher-quality participation. As the social web continues to grow, this will only become more important.
This is certainly a shortlist, so I’ll turn it over to the readers: What’s your best tip for optimizing time spent in social media?

I hope you make the most out of the above social media tips and tricks. They have helped me greatly so I wanted to pass them on.

Kind regards,

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