- Build social proof. Your business needs to be a solid presence online, one that people feel they can depend on. You can instill customers with that trust by providing reviews, recommendations, and testimonials on your site. Take time to just talk about your business, rather than using all your virtual space to push the sale.
- Quality over quantity. Sure, you may connect with 50,000 people on Twitter or have thousands of friends on Facebook, but how many of them will actually convert into clients? The point of social media isn't to accumulate numbers, it is to develop deeper relationships with people already interested in your business. Focus on them and the numbers won't matter.
- Set a plan and some guidelines. Being active in social media requires you to have a social media policy that details what employees are allowed to tweet about and what topics are not for the world to read. All employees should sign the policy, which will protect the business if they leave on unfriendly terms. Your social media plan should also detail when you will post, what you will write about, and how you will handle responding to messages.
This is a new age of marketing; many traditional rules don't apply. Social media is aimed at starting conversations and building relationships, not one-sided dialogue, so get out there and start conversing!