There’s a lot that corporate CEOs can learn from Barack Obama. After all, Obama is really the CEO of the largest corporation on the planet – The United States government. Here are five social media lessons to take home from Barack Obama.

#1 – Hire Social Media Savvy Staff

Did you know that Obama hired senior staff from the popular social media site Reddit to help run both his campaign and his White House?

If you plan on using social media, make sure you hire people who understand social media. Social media involves understanding quite a different mindset than traditional branding-based marketing.

While it’s possible to train someone from the ground up, it usually makes more sense to just hire people who have the skills already.

#2 – Use Social Media to Influence Perception

Barack Obama understands the power of painting pictures. He also understands the power of social media for putting spin on things.

For example, when Osama Bin Laden was captured, Barack Obama deliberately released photos from within the situation room. The images showed Obama and his staff carefully deliberating the situation. They were victorious, but not boastful. For a lot of people, this image helped reinforce a sense of trust in the president’s decision making.

Another example was how President Obama used the White House Correspondent’s dinner as a viral springboard. The dinner, which usually few pay attention to, got millions of views on YouTube. As a result of this video, President Obama’s image of being overly calm and collected was somewhat dispersed by his sense of humor.

Social media has enormous power to change image.

#3 – Leverage the Power to Spread a Message

Obama really understands how social media can be used to spread a message.

When the opposition launched a campaign to extend a payroll tax, President Obama and his White House used various social media platforms to spread the message.

They used infographics that showed exactly how the payroll tax would affect the average person. They created a lot of buzz on various social media platforms. They raised a lot of awareness of the issue through the power of social media.

In the past, an advocate had to go out of their way to create signs or make phone calls to support a cause. Today, all they have to do is click “share.” This is a game changer and President Obama knows it.

If you have a message, try to get people on board and on your side using social media.

#4 – Adapt to Changing Business Models

New technologies and new business models appear everyday. The faster you are to catch on and adapt, the more you’ll pull ahead of your competition.

In Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign, they decided to take donations using Square, a small device attached to iOS smartphones that can allow people to take payments on the road. Instead of having to take down credit card details of donors, street canvassers can now charge their card right on the spot.

What new technologies are arising in your industry? Are you on the cutting edge or are you just doing things the way they’ve always been done?

#5 – Obama Tweets!

The President of the United States is an active Twitter user. In fact, Twitter is an integral part of his strategy for shaping his image and for spreading the word on his various initiatives.

Are you “too busy” to tweet? Tweeting can create a more humane image for your brand. People feel like they’re getting to know the people behind a brand, rather than just get advertised to all day. In addition, Twitter is a great place to make important announcements or diffuse PR issues.

These are five ways in which President Obama uses social media intelligently. What can you take away from these lessons?

The more engaged your users are, the more likely they are to comment, share or like your content. Low engagement means your users may not even be seeing your content. It could also mean your posts are missing the mark with your users. On the other hand, high engagement means you have a healthy Facebook page. In order to use Facebook as an effective marketing tool, you should regularly check your engagement metrics and work to improve your user engagement.

That said, here are five different ways you can improve your readers’ engagement.

#1 – Ask for Feedback

Customers are going to give feedback whether you like it or not. The only difference is, if you ask for it, they’ll express it to you rather than (or in addition to) their social network.

If your customers have a complaint, you want to hear about it directly. You don’t want them posting it to their walls. If your customers love your social media strategy, you want to hear about that as well so you can continue doing whatever it was that they loved.

#2 – Post When You’ll Get Read

Post your content during times of day when you’ll likely be read by your target audience.

The best times of day are as follows. In the morning, between 10am and 11am is when people have a bit of downtime at work. People rarely check Facebook before work, since they’re in a rush to get ready. However, once they’ve settled down on their computer and gotten any urgent communications out of the way, they’ll often check Facebook.

Next you have 4pm to 5pm, when people get off work. Finally, you have 10pm to 11pm, when people do their late night Facebook checks. These times have come up time and again as the best times to post updates.

Make sure you’re posting during these times, in whatever time zones the majority of your audience is in.

#3 – Establish Alerts & Monitors

Setup systems that’ll alert you whenever your brand’s name is mentioned on Twitter, the blogosphere or public Facebook pages. This will allow you to catch any potentially bad PR early on, rather than once it goes viral.

People want to know that you’re listening to their concerns. If a customer posts something to their Twitter and receives a response directly from your company quickly, it’ll diffuse any potential tension. Furthermore, you’ve increased engagement and opened a new channel of communication.

#4 – Do Prized Surveys Regularly

Sometimes asking for feedback just isn’t enough. Instead, you need to conduct a survey of your customers on your service quality, pricing, products, branding, marketing, communication and a whole host of other questions. Since you’re asking for such an in depth commitment from them in the form of filling out a large survey, you can’t reasonably expect them to do it for free.

Instead, offer a prize. For example, you might randomly give a $100 iTunes gift card to one survey participant. Even if most people know they won’t reasonably have a chance to win the card, they’ll still often fill out the survey on the off chance.

The survey will give you important data that’ll allow you to tailor fit your message to improve your facebook engagement. Also, someone who goes out of their way to fill out a long survey is much more engaged with your brand already.

#5 – Balance Statistical Analysis with Emotional Contact

Doing well on social media requires that you have a good balance between optimizing your stats and making powerful emotional contact.

In your stats dashboard, you want to constantly aim to improve your engagement stats. You want to improve your virality, you want to improve your reach, you want the numbers to go up. It’s a very analytical kind of mindset.

On the other hand, you also need to be able to put your statistician hat down and engage with your users as real human beings. It’s this human to human approach that builds real goodwill in a brand.

By now, you’ve probably heard that social media is important for SEO. Yet most advice around social and SEO seems rather vague. How, exactly, does social media impact SEO? What can you do about it? How can you use social media to improve your own SERPs?

This question can actually be broken down into two parts: Part one is getting your social media profiles, like your Twitter feed and your Facebook page, to rank. The second part is how to use the power of social media to get your primary site ranked higher.

Let’s explore both of these avenues.

How to Boost Your Social Media Profile SERPs

Imagine owning the top three spots for your primary search term: Your main site ranks, as well as your Twitter feed and your Facebook page. You’ll effectively destroy any other site(s) trying to rank for that position.

Of course, this is a dream scenario that rarely happens. However, getting your social media profiles to rank is certainly a worthwhile goal to shoot for. So how is it done?

The first and most important thing to do is to link to your social media profiles from your home page. This lets the search engines know that your social media profile is linked to you. This is actually perhaps the most important thing you could do to boost your social media profile rankings.

Next, build backlinks to your social media profiles. After all, they’re also webpages and need to be ranked just like any other page.

Get as many likes or follows as possible. The more likes or follows you have, the higher the perceived authority.

Use your product’s names and your brand’s names in your tweet. This will increase the relevance of the page to the keywords you want to rank for.

Finally, make sure you have your brand name and/or your keywords in your profile’s shortcode or URL. Having the keyword there will help with the rankings, help Google identify the “official” page and help users find your page.

If you follow all these steps, your social media page has a very strong chance of ranking.

Leverage the Power of Social Media to Rank Your Main Site

Social media can do a lot for your main site. Here’s how.

First, your primary focus should be to get likes and to get people to share your content. Google can read not only the number of likes you get, but the authority of the people liking you and even the sentiment of the people posting on your page.

While it’s possible to manipulate these factors, the best way to achieve strong rankings with social SEO in the long run is to really optimize your page properly. Get as many likes from real people as possible. Post high quality content and work to increase your reach and your virality stats.

Add a social media widget to your site. You can get WordPress plugins that make it very easy to add a whole social media toolbar to every post on your site. If you run a standard HTML site or use another CMS, you can simply string a few widgets together to create your own social media toolbar.

Make it easy for people who’re on your site to like your pages, tweet about your content or to like specific pieces of content. Remember that every time someone “likes” your page, it gets posted to their wall. Every time someone shares something you posted, you get exposed to a few hundred more people.

Publish tools that are designed to be shared. If you run a weight loss calculator for example, have a simple and easy to click link on the bottom that encourages people to share the calculator with other weight-conscious friends.

Tools are some of the most viral kinds of pages out there; yet many tool publishers simply forget to make their tools easy to share.

Social media is already an important factor in search. While it’s still a minority factor, many experts agree that it’s most likely going to gain in importance in the years to come. By starting on your social media SEO today, you’ll give yourself and your company a leg up over your competition in the coming years.

Most business owners and entrepreneurs have extremely packed schedules. If your calendar is already full to the brim, where can you find time for social media? How can you manage your Twitter account, your Facebook page and your blog without over booking yourself and stressing yourself out? The answer: To add social media to your lifestyle. Instead of viewing it as another task, integrate it into how you live your life.

Here’s how to do it.

Tweet or Facebook on Your Smartphone

You’re going to have downtime during the day. Perhaps it’s while you’re on the bus. Perhaps it’s while you’re eating lunch. Perhaps it’s when you’re in the bathroom.

Wherever it is, there are going to be times in the day where you’re simply not doing anything else. Instead of wasting this time, use your smartphone or your iPad and turn it into social media time.

Use this time to write 140 character Tweets. Use this time to update your Facebook page. Use this time to come up with new blog ideas or to write the outline for your next blog post.

Replace Newspaper With Tweeting

For most people, the first thing they do in the morning is grab a cup of coffee and read the newspaper.

But the reality is, reading the newspaper isn’t going to do all that much for your business and professional life. Instead, what if you made tweeting with coffee your daily habit?

This would allow you to reach out to your audience while you’re just going through your everyday routines. You won’t ever miss a day of tweeting, because it’s part of your daily schedule.

The 30 Minute a Day Habit

Wrap-up the end of your work day with 30 minutes of work on your social media. The key here again is to make this part of your everyday schedule. If you don’t have to think about it, it won’t stress you out.

This 30 minutes can be spent on anything. You can use it to write tweets, or even schedule out tweets using HootSuite. You can use it to update your Facebook page. You can also spend it writing a blog post.

Just knowing that you have these 30 minutes at the end of your work day will help relieve the pressure or sense of obligation that you should be working on your social media. You know you’ll get to it. It also prevents you from wasting time on Facebook or on chatter, as you know you only have 30 minutes to get things done.

Put on Your “Share Goggles”

As you move through your everyday life, ask yourself: “Can I Share This?” Whenever you look at something, think about whether it can be part of a photo share. Whenever something unique happens, think about whether you can tie it to a lesson for your blog.

For example, let’s say you run a small investment firm. You recently got into playing chess. If you didn’t have your “Share Goggles” on, you might treat them as completely unrelated.

With your “Share Goggles” on however, you might start seeing correlations. You might see similarities in the learning curve between learning how to manage money and how to play chess. You might see similarities in how people think of risk. You might see similarities in how people handle loss.

You then write up a blog post, “9 Lessons About Investing I Learned from Chess” and make your blog popular.

Even if you have a completely booked schedule and feel like you’re working around the clock, you can still find the time for social media if you incorporate it into your lifestyle. Don’t stress about it, just make it part of your life.

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Also take a look at the demand side of it – number of searches being performed for it.

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So, it is clear that there’s a huge demand for it and there are many suppliers catering to it. Agree, these may not be automated likes, and they are real human beings. But 95% the fans purchased have fake profiles and are not real users. You will realize that once you start exploring the other side of it, ie, try joining any of these sites as a user (fan willing to sell your likes), then you will know who your ‘purchased fans’ are and what their motive is!

Now let’s take a look at the possible advantages and disadvantages of buying fans or likes.

Also take a look at FB’s terms and conditions.

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Terms and conditions #4.2 says no individual is allowed to create more than 1 profile. Facebook’s page admin analytics shows the sources of the likes of each page which means they can easily track any suspicious fan growth. But why are they not acting?

• Because they want to show a huge userbase?
• Because they want business pages to spend more time and resources on facebook using their advertising platform.
• The process of finding out and taking corrective actions are complex and expensive?

Whatever may be the reason, is it good in the long term for brands and for facebook itself? Is the cost of technology to maintain these fake profiles worth for Facebook?

What are your thoughts? Please share them below.

Your customers are the most haphazard brand managers in the world. While your internal brand managers might spend days figuring out the perfect message to put out, your customers are just going out there and sharing whatever comes to their mind. They do it without filters, to hundreds, thousands, even millions of people.

Twitter is the second largest social media in the world. It’s also the most conversational social media network. Getting your Twitter setup done well will make it easier and more likely for people to talk about you and to you on this vast and fast paced social network.

Here are the four most important things for optimizing your Twitter account.

#1 – Informative Username That Sounds Great

Your username should have a snap to it. People should hear the username and immediately understand what your business is about. It should ideally also either be identical to or be related to your business or brand’s name.

Ask other people what they think about your Twitter name before you commit to it. Ideally, the name you choose for Twitter account is also the name you use on Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networks.

#2 – A Background and Profile Photo That Stand Out

The second thing you need is a background that really stands out and a profile photo that goes along with it.

Your background is your opportunity to demonstrate how much you care about your Twitter page. People who really care about Twitter put a lot of effort into their backgrounds. They look absolutely stunning.

Your background should be well designed. It should look like a lot of effort went into it; or it should look like it was done by a professional designer. If you don’t know how to make a world class design, consider hiring someone to do it for you.

Your Twitter profile photo should match and compliment this background.

#3 – An Informative, Snappy Bio

Your bio is a very short and succinct overview of who you are, what your company does and what customers can expect from your Twitter feed.

It should be attention catching and snappy while also interesting at the same time. Take a look at how other people wrote their bios. Some people choose to be just informative, while others add a good deal of personality to it.

How you write your bio depends largely on how you want to be perceived. A playful brand might use brighter and more fun words, while a large corporation probably wants to be a little more professional.

You could also consider adding some of your keywords to your bio. This can help you get more traffic.

#4 – Talk About What People Care About

Don’t use your Twitter account as a promotion engine. Instead, use it as a way to build a relationship with potential customers. Use it to put out value in the world, rather than try to use it to get people to buy.

Post things that people care about. Post tips. Share resources. Give discounts. Answer questions. Have a two-way relationship with your customers.

Post timely information. Use RSS feeds to monitor blogs in your industry and talk about events and ideas as they gain popularity. Use Google Insights to see what topics are getting hot and what topics are fazing out of favor.

Sprinkle in search engine targeted keywords here and there. Twitter shouldn’t be about SEO, but it certainly doesn’t hurt to have a couple keywords that you’re trying to rank for with your Twitter page.

Twitter Marketing isn’t like buying a newspaper ad. It’s not you pushing marketing into the world. It’s you having a two-way conversation with your audience. These tips will help you make a great first impression on your audience, then help you have a great conversation with them afterwards.

If you respond to the assault quickly, you’ll be able to walk away with your brand, business and reputation in tact. On the other hand, fail to respond and you’ll quickly find your customers fleeing to your competitors.

Here are six steps to protecting your brand and your reputation.

Step 1: Acknowledge the Crisis Immediately

The worst thing you could do is try to pretend as if nothing is happening.

On the social web, companies that take responsibility for their mistakes and quickly respond to social media firestorms can put out the fires quickly with a good response. However, fail to respond and the firestorm will spread and spread and spread.

Step 2: Don’t Say Anything Until You Have Something to Say

Until you have a meaningful response, don’t say anything. If you go into the public spotlight and say something that’s essentially an empty apology, you could exacerbate the problem.

BP’s CEO did this spectacularly after the Gulf of Mexico oil spill through statements like “nobody wants this over more than me, I’d like my life back.”

Until you have a solid response, hold off on going public.

Step 3: Learn to Make U-Turns

Know when you’re wrong and when you have to make U-Turns. If you think one thing but your customers adamantly shout something else, listen to your customers.

Apple made a great U-Turn with the iPhone 4 launch. When people started complaining about the iPhone 4 antennae issue, Steve Jobs wasn’t worried. He simply said “just don’t hold it that way.”

Then the issue grew and grew and grew until it was on every tech blog and on the front page of several national newspapers. That’s when Apple realized: They were wrong.

So they made a U-Turn. They issued free bumpers to everyone who bought an iPhone 4. An expensive reversal, but it may very well have saved the brand and the product launch.

Step 4: Improve Customer to Brand Communication

How easy is it for a customer to get in touch with you? If you have a major PR crisis on your hand, it needs to be as easy as possible for someone to get in touch.

Setup a hotline. Create a special Twitter hashtag. Create a helpdesk support ticket system just for this one issue.

Make it easy for customers with concerns about the issue at hand to get in touch with a real human being. That might sound costly, but when weighed against losing a customer for life, the cost is marginal.

Step 5: Learn and Setup Alert Systems

If you were blindsided by this issue, take a look at your alert systems. You should have systems setup that allow you to catch these kinds of issues before they balloon into crises.

For example, you should have systems in place that scan Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites to see what people are saying about your brand. You should have Google Alerts (or a similar system) setup to monitor news and blog feeds to see if people are talking about you.

This allows you to catch potentially damaging stories early in the cycle, rather than play catchup later down the line. Learn from your mistakes and setup new systems to catch PR issues from the start.

Step 6: Increase Visibility, Change the Topic, Build Your Brand

The best way to get someone over talking about a negative topic is to move on to a positive one. If your company made a mistake, apologize, make amends, then move on. Don’t keep apologizing and don’t keep focusing on the mistake. That’ll only remind people of the past.

Instead, increase your visibility and move on to a different topic. Announce a new company initiative, or let the public know about a new product that’s in the works. Let the old talk die down and give your audience something new to talk about. Speak, create videos, publish content and get the word out about the new thing. The old thing will die on its own.

This six step process will help you handle just about any brand, reputation or PR crisis that comes your way.

Here are six tips for building a blog following that follows your each and every post.

Tip #1 – Stop Using “Get Traffic Quick” Tactics

Stop trying to circumvent the traffic generation process. Building a solid blog following is a process that does inherently take some time.

Tactics like gaming StumbleUpon or Reddit, writing deceptively attention catching titles and so on are not the answer to getting high quality long term traffic.

Instead, aim to provide quality content that people will actually want to share. Create content that inspires people to come back time and again. That’ll get you more blog traffic than any quick fix solution.

Tip #2 – Tap Your Customer Base

One place people often neglect is their existing customer base. Often time’s people try to separate their customers from their blog.

For example, they might only send marketing materials using email to their customer list, while they try to use their blog to attract new customers. This is counter productive.

Your customers need to be sold just like anyone else. They need to continually be reminded of your credibility and expertise. Furthermore, by continually providing value in the form of free content, you increase the chances that they’ll buy again.

Try and get your buyers to become readers. Let them know about your blog in your promotional emails and perhaps even in the product itself.

Tip #3 – Narrow Down Your Audience

Does your message hit home? Do your customers feel like you’re talking to them directly?

Many blogs try and be far, far too broad and generic. For example, a blog that’s targeting “internet marketers” is almost definitely going to get lost in the crowd.

On the other hand, a blog that’s dedicated to helping new stay at home moms create a second stream of income could work very well.

What is your core audience? Try and narrow your audience down to the people who would most likely relate to you. Then speak to them directly.

Tip #4 – Do Guest Posts, Accept Guest Posts

Guest posting is one of the best ways for bloggers to vouch for one another and share traffic.

If you guest post on someone else’s site, they’re implicitly endorsing you. You’ll get your content in front of their audience, which means a lot of high quality traffic back to your website. You’ll also get a great backlink.

By accepting guest posts, you give back to the blogging community. You add variety to your blog, so it’s not always just you writing. Other bloggers are also likely to link to their own guest posts, which means a high quality backlink as well.

Tip #5 – Leverage Current Events and Trends

You can get a lot of blog traffic by tapping into existing trends and things that people are already talking about right now.

For example, the founders of Air B’n’B tapped into the election by helping people find beds near the democratic and republican conventions. A spa might tap into Valentine ’s Day by offering a couple’s tandem massage.

Blogs can do something similar. Try to tie your blog’s content to existing events and use that to drive more traffic to your blog.

Tip #6 – Publish Consistently

Having a consistent publishing schedule is one of the most important things for a successful blog. If you get someone interested in your content, they’ll want to come back and see new content. If they come back a few times and don’t see anything new, they probably won’t return again.

Set a publishing schedule and stick to it. Let people know what to expect from your blog. That schedule could be every day, or just a couple times a month. You don’t have to publish very often, you just have to commit to publishing consistently.

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That’s why getting your content strategy right is so important. If you’re making any one of these five mistakes, chances are you’re destroying your website’s chances at success.

Mistake #1 – Not Owning Your Content

It’s very common for people to publish content on websites other than their own. For example, you might publish content on other people’s sites through guest blogging or article marketing.

There’s nothing wrong with this. The mistake comes in when you don’t own any of your best content.

The majority of your top notch content should be on your own website. It shouldn’t be out on the internet. Your best content should be used to build your brand, not someone else’s.

Mistake #2 – Not Knowing Your Target Audience

Who are you talking to? What are their needs? What have they already heard before and what are they dying to hear? What kind of words and language do they use?

If you don’t have a crystal clear sense of who your target audience is, you aren’t going to be able to speak to them in a way that has them feel understood.

Try to get a solid sense of who your target audience is by asking them as many questions as possible. Browse internet forums to see what kind of questions they tend to ask.

Mistake #3 – Relying on Content with No Link Strategy

It’s true that high quality content is important. Yet, webmasters who focus only on the quality of their content and not on SEO are invariably disappointed.

Your content won’t spread virally on its own. You won’t get ranked just on the merits of your content. As great as your content may be, you still need to understand the basics of SEO.

It’s like the parable of the inventor who didn’t know how to sell his invention. It doesn’t matter how great your invention (your content) is, if you can’t sell it, it won’t make an ounce of difference.

Come up with a great linkbuilding strategy to help get your high quality content in front of your readers.

Mistake #4 – Too Much Sales

Your website’s job should first and foremost be about providing high quality content. This is what will attract people to your website.

Webmasters who spend the majority of their web space on promotions end up shooting themselves in the foot by alienating their audience.

Don’t lock your content. Don’t put it behind newsletter walls and squeeze pages. Don’t make your customers work to view the quality of your content.

Put your best content right upfront, so people can see that you’re the real deal. This builds credibility and increases reader loyalty.

Mistake #5 – Not Using Multi-Media

The internet isn’t a text-based universe. Perhaps ten years ago it was, but today if you’re only getting your message out by text, you’re going to get left behind.

Take a look at your Facebook feed. How many articles are being shared? And how many YouTube videos are being shared?

Multi-media is getting more and more prevalent and it’s only going to get more so in the future.

Develop the right content strategy by taking your existing content and concepts and packaging them into different forms of content. Take your blog posts and turn them into audio podcasts that people can listen to on their iPods and iPhones. Take your comedic or controversial ideas and turn them into videos that can spread virally.

Brainstorm new ideas to express your opinions and your brands that wouldn’t have been possible in text. Take full advantage of the power of new media that’s available today.

Getting into media production today is cheaper than it has ever been before. A high definition camera costs under $200. Professional grade video editing can be done at bargain prices. The level of investment simply shouldn’t be a barrier for taking your company’s content into the digital age.

These are five of the most common and fatal content strategy mistakes that people make. Avoid these mistakes at all costs.

Social media today is an integral part of any successful business. Almost everyone is on these networks, from your partners to your readers to your vendors to your clients. That said, there’s still only so much you can do every day on social media.

Approach social media with an 80/20 mindset. Of course it’s possible to spend 8 hours a day on social media. But chances are, in about an hour you’ll have connected with the most important contacts and said everything you have to say.

After the first hour, you’re more or less just spending time doing things that may or may not have much of an impact on your bottom line. Instead of doing this, it’s best to just commit to spending one hour a day on social media.

This consistent attention will allow you to make connections with all the most important people, while spending the rest of your time on the rest of your business.

Developing a Social Media Marketing Strategy is About Cultivating Relationships

Don’t think of social media like TV advertising. With TV advertising, your goal is to “touch” as many people as you can. Each person might not know much about you or your brand, but you’re okay with that. You just want to make a small impression on them.

Social media Marketing is different. Think of social media like a business mingler. There are a lot of people there and you might shake hands with a large number of people.

At the end of the day however, you have to pick and choose just a few people to get to know better. These people could turn out to be customers, they could turn out to be joint venture partners, they could turn out to be mentors.

On social media, it’s simply unrealistic to get to know everyone who’s following you. However, you can and should pick a few high impact people to develop connections with. Exchanging a message or two a day is quick and easy, but can result in powerful business connections down the line.

Schedule it in – It’s Not Optional

A lot of people treat social media for business as an optional activity. After all, browsing Facebook and Twitter can seem like a trivial activity on the surface.

It’s not. It’s a crucial business networking tactic that simply cannot be ignored. And unlike other marketing tactics, you can’t makeup for it by stuffing in more time later.

Spending 7 hours one day on social media is not the same thing as spending 1 hour a day on social media. You can’t have conversations in a day, you can’t develop relationships in bulk and you can’t stay in touch all at once.

Instead, it’s something that has to be done every day. So schedule it into your daily schedule, just as you would any other important business task. Social media marketing isn’t something that can be neglected. If something comes up, move it to another time, but never skip it.

If You Don’t Have a Strong Plan…

If you don’t have a strong social media plan yet, allocate an extra 30 minutes a day to learning about social media and planning your strategy.

Just browsing Facebook isn’t social media marketing. The goal of social media marketing is to create engagement with people on the social web. There are a lot of different factors that go into this eventual end goal.

If you don’t know how to maximize your time spent on social media yet, spend a bit of time studying up on the subject.

Learn to Enjoy it!

Social media marketing shouldn’t feel like a chore. You’re on Facebook! You’re on Twitter! It should be fun and interesting. You’re meeting new people, making new contacts and making progress in your business.

Learn to enjoy social media marketing, so that you’ll look forward to it rather than avoid it. Learn to enjoy it, so that when you get an email once you’re off work, you’ll still naturally want to respond to it.

Social media for businesses is a critically important tool that can’t be ignored. However, you should also be careful and make sure it doesn’t suck up all your time. About one hour a day is the perfect amount of time to spend on social media marketing.