So you created a Twitter account or Facebook page but now what?

How do you get people to actually visit your site or pages? How do you make these Social Media site work for you? Here are a few best practice tips to help you get the ball rolling.

1. When it comes to Social Media marketing your business need to looks and feel as if you were starting a new division for your company. This takes planning, development, execution and evaluation so that you know exactly what you are looking to achieve through this new market. Your business needs to develop the right metrics well before you execute your plan as be able to evaluate your new strategy to see if what you are doing is improving the companies bottom end or if the resources utilized are in fact having the opposite effect. What's the time frame you are giving your organization to push this new marketing strategy before evaluation. Most importantly who is going to handle this process, will this be done from a departmental level or will the sole strategy rest in the hands of a single individual.

2. Even though you are now online and have the marketing potential of millions of viewers, in the end you are still dealing with human beings on the other end of the network. Before anyone jumps up an down to buy what you are selling they need to know that you are a business they can trust. Creating the task of making a business more personal is a lot of work, but it has big pay offs down the road. For people to trust you they need to hear from you, posting comments on other peoples pages and replying to tweets creates an intimate bond that opens the door for you to offer them an inside view into your organization.

3. Once you have opened up the door and people are starting to interact with your Social Media account then you need to welcome feedback, this isn't just advertising of a product or a service you want to know what your communities perception of your organization level is. Now not all feedback will be good but organizations who try and use censorship in the end find that they are doing their organization more harm than good. If someone wants to speak badly about your company there are a million other websites that will allow them to do so, so if the feedback you are getting is less then par then try and open up the lines of communication with the disgruntled and take notes on ways your organization can improve.

4. Just because your organization has gown to become a global powerhouse does not mean that you need to be transparent. Companies find the best results to Social Media Marketing when they can interact with their potential customers on a more intimate level. Confused? Let me give you an example, "Hurley" the clothing organization known for it's beach wear attire devised a Social Media Marketing strategy as to where they were trying to develop new garments for the Summer 2011 line. One of ideas they pushed out was a single elimination design vs. design on their potential board shorts, this meant that every week they would display two pairs of shorts each with their own designs and ask the people to comment on which one they liked the best. What started out as 12 pairs of short designs eventually weeded down to a single pair that last week when I went into purchase a new pair of board shorts for myself I saw sitting on the rack. This company just saved itself an incredible amount of money in producing 12 different pairs of shorts that may or may not have had good sales. This was an example of market research at it's finest, and how to really make Social Media Marketing work for an organization.

5. Now I touched on this earlier in regards to designing your Metrics to see how the performance is working utilizing your Social Media Marketing strategies, but one inconsequential gain that you may overlook is the amount of people that you are now able to interact with. Besides just the sales numbers, look at the amount of people that have added you to their friends list. This can at times be just as valuable as those that are there to purchase, extending your reach and interacting with people to whom without the Internet you would have never been able to contact can help many organizations if nothing else help get their word out and let people know who and what you offer on a more personal level.

I hope those tips help and happy marketing! I would like to know what Practice do you follow when developing your social marketing strategies, please feel free to add to this list