I received a short report written by David Carleton - Street Smart Sales and Marketing, where he outlines what he considers the 7 most important steps to social media success. They are:

1. Define your goals - What are you trying to accomplish?
2. Learn as much and as quickly as you can before you get started
3. Select which social media websites to concentrate on
4. Develop strategies that will give you the fastest results in the shortest amount of time.
5. Decide how much time you can spend on your social media marketing efforts.
6. Determine how much money you are willing to spend on your social media marketing efforts.
7. Decide upfront how you will measure your success

This is all part of putting together a business plan for your business.  If you are involved at all in using the internet as part of your business plan, you know how daunting it can be without a plan.  For instance, in step 4 he says to decide how much time you can spend on social media marketing.  If you have used Twitter, you can easily get sucked in and wile away hours of your time that could be better spent in other aspects of your business.

I also found step 2 to be very appropriate.  Take Twitter for instance, if you jump in and just start using it willy-nilly, in a short period of time you will come to realize you wished you had taken it a little more slowly, as there is a right way and a wrong way to use Twitter for marketing.

While I have only picked on two of the above points, I don’t mean to diminish the others.  In other words—-you need a plan.

Go to David’s website, StreetSmartSalesAndMarketing and check out the Free Resources in the left column.

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