A social presence without a strategy is like a general going into battle without a plan: It’s not going to go over well. While a social media strategy is important, often the foundation is forgotten and people and businesses dive right into more of the mechanics of everything.

In this video, we touch on 3 questions you should ask yourself before creating a social media strategy, the pre-process if you will. These 3 questions will get you on the right track.

Since Google added Search Plus Your World to their search engine, social search has been an increasingly more popular subject. It’s nothing new, in fact not too long ago and way before Google+ came about, Twitter was implemented into Google Search, social search 1.0 if you will.

As I write this in May 2012, Microsoft has also added social search to Bing with the integration of Facebook. The whole concept right now is a bit like Twitter in the beginning stages: Looked at oddly and the significance downplayed tremendously. The reality however is that social search will one day simply become “search”.

You see, the Internet as a whole is going the way of social. There’s no escaping it. We’ve seen these changes happening for years and with the changes Google has made and the changes Bing is making, we’re reaching the precipice. With that said, social search is still in the early stages. It just hasn’t caught on that much.

Over the next few years, that’s likely to change as even more people flock to social networks and integration with these social networks becomes deeper and deeper. This all brings us back to businesses utilizing social media and investing time with the various platforms. Those who do and on an active, consistent basis, will already have an advantage once social search becomes more of just search.

In the meantime, it all comes down to content. Highly targeted, highly valuable content that is both created on social networks and created on blogs to then be spread on social networks. +1′s, likes, and retweets will and are becoming the new influencing factor whereas it used to be just comments and backlinks.

And since Google is giving so much weight to Google+ which, being their own social network makes obvious sense, those who are already investing the time there, will definitely reap the rewards as time goes on.

Foursquare has gained a lot of traction over the years. Social media facilitates the need to let people know what you’re doing and location based services help fill that need. While that’s all fine and dandy (I do it myself on occasion), there are times when people can overdo it, say checking into every single place they go, their home which is completely idiotic, and more.

Businesses are wanting that definitive edge over their competition and one way they are doing that is by auto-tweeting people who check-in to their locations.

In this video, we dive into what two companies are doing, Dairy Queen and Walgreens, and if it’s really the most effective way of going about it.

Social networks are a dime a dozen, though most of us are familiar with the big five: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and Pinterest. One of the questions that I’ve heard and hear on a consistent basis is “which social network should I be using?”.

This is always a rather amusing question. As Chris Brogan said in our video chat, he tries to be everywhere and I’d agree to an extent.

An inherent problem is social networks all have their pre-conceived notions about them. Google+ is a ghost town, Twitter is for talking about yourself and posting pictures of food, Facebook is for playing Farmville and reconnecting with friends from high school, and so on.

The reality? All bullshit.

It’s mind blowing the amount of businesses that will completely ignore a social media site because of these stereotypes. Sure, as with many stereotypes they are true to an extent, but that does not define them as a whole.

I have a theory when it comes to people dogging on different networks and it makes a lot of sense: People are too lazy or lack the resources to invest the time. Hey, we’ve all been there. Lack the resources? Find someone who can help you. Too lazy? Get off your ass or, again, find someone who can help.

With that said however, not every single platform is going to be all hunky dory for your business. Not every customer will be where XYZ Social Media advocate/guru/evangelist says they are, though Facebook is definitely an exception to the rule.

The point is, setting pre-conceived notions aside and actually doing some research, asking around, actually communicating with your customers, will let you know where they are spending time.

Several months back, my good friend Jeff Cryder stopped by a Hangout On Air on Google+ to chat with us about social media. He shared a fantastic tip to finding out if your customer base is on Google+, in fact, this method will work on multiple platforms. Below I’ve spliced the clip together where he talked about it.

It’s not about the platform; It’s where the audience is. Neglecting a network may actually be leaving money and new and valuable relationships on the table.

One of the biggest complaints with Google Plus, particularly for marketers and developers, is the lack of an API. Many want to post to the social network through a third party tool, developers want to create something cool, yet they can’t.

As we all know, being able to track your results is important, not just in social media, but anywhere. Fortunately, there’s a great free tool that crawls your Google+ profile and shows you how well you’re performing. Check out the video review below:

We’ve pretty much gotten past the stage where it’s easy for businesses to ignore Facebook and having their own page. With the insane growth (900 Million+ active users) and new design changes, the social network is constantly shining in the spotlight. Unfortunately, a lot of businesses are making some pretty big mistakes and is costing them fans and interaction.

Constantly Asking For Likes And Shares

You’ve seen it and may even have some pages liked that do it. They post a photo or simply some text and say to “Like” it. The reasoning for this is pretty straightforward: Because of the EdgeRank algorithm with the news feed, if people don’t engage with your posts (liking, commenting, sharing) on a consistent basis, they will see less and less of your posts.

Despite that, constantly begging for likes promotes lower quality, not high quality content. It is like-whoring at best. Great content wins, period, and thanks to Timeline, it’s much easier to tell a story instead of resorting to what 98% of all the other Facebook pages do.

Posting Through Third Party Tools

From first glance, this may not seem like a big deal. It’s saving you time and you can still get your message across. Wrong.

Research has been shown that using third party tools to post to a Facebook page drastically decreases the amount of people that actually see your posts, 88% fewer comments and likes to be exact. Why? Again, comes back to EdgeRank and how they rank third party tools.

This is especially cringe worthy when you see brands with Millions of fans, yet still use a tool such as Hootsuite to post to their page. Think about it. If they stopped using a third party tool to post, they could increase the amount of fans that see their content by Millions each month. Now that is a case of a very exponential increase thanks to a simple little change.

Sharing A Link And That’s It

We’ve all done it. You publish your latest post, video, whatever it may be, and when it comes time to share on Facebook, you copy and paste the link, let it populate, and post. Pretty simple. The reality though is we can all do much better than that.

Be creative. You’ve got 63,206 characters so use it to ask an engaging question or add some teaser content (though I don’t recommend using the full 63,206).

According to Sprout Social, only 17% of fans actually see your posts and if we take into account that less than 1 percent interact with your posts, you’ve got to put in more effort if you want more people to engage with you!

Not Responding To Fans

Some may look at Twitter as more of a customer service platform, but Facebook can be valuable in that instance as well. There’s a slew of pages where, they get people asking questions or leaving a compliment, yet it goes unresponded to.

We live in a World where we can communicate in real-time or almost real-time, and further build trusting and lasting relationships with a keyboard and click of a button.

By not responding where you can, you’re potentially leaving a lot of business on the table. If you’re fortunate enough to be in the position where you simply can’t keep up with the conversation on your page, maybe it’s time to hire someone.

Chris Brogan is known across the Internet as the guy when it comes to Social Media. While that may be the case, he’s also an author, speaker, entrepreneur, and the list goes on.

Chris was awesome enough to take some time out of his day and stop by a Hangout On Air via Google+. In it, we chat about social media, blogging, and more. Unfortunately, he chose against wearing a computer generated top hat and monocle during the interview. Maybe next time…

Facebook pages have gone through many changes over the years, the most recent change being the new design. One thing that’s been pretty consistent since the beginning is EdgeRank, an algorithm that determines how content is displayed on people’s newsfeeds.

One thing that has been known for some time is that if a friend or fan doesn’t engage with your posts (liking, commenting, sharing), over time they will see them less and less. A way that marketers have helped alleviate this problem is by asking to “Like” a post.

Unfortunately, this has lead to a new term which I talk about in the video below, as well as some bad examples, and other pages we can learn from.

Not having a Facebook page is almost like not having a website. In today’s World of social media, you want to be where your customers are and chances are, they’re on Facebook. While having a page is great, there is a new problem that’s creeping up.

According to some stats posted by USA Today, more companies are neglecting a blog and instead focusing more on a Facebook page. This is a problem for a couple reasons which we dive into below:

Thanks to Augie Ray and Eric Andersen for bringing this to my attention.