What too many people do not recognize is that social media is an investment, not a frivolous activity. You will spend time and probably some money, but you will have your efforts show an impressive ROI if you stick with it. In that regard, social media is extremely valuable. It will take time to build a network and develop trust; but with that comes engagement which is what everyone needs.  The first thing you have to find is your audience.  To do this, define objectives, formulate a strategy, develop tactics, implement tools and use measurement to determine your progress. Do it right, and you will see results!

Never forget this rule: Quality is more important than quantity (but quantity is good, too!) You don’t need million so followers in name only. You need an audience of a thousand people who are genuinely interested in what you have to share because those are the people that drive your engagement. Without engagement you’re just broadcasting and that is not social.

Hearing is easy, but listening requires focus. It’s great to have a big list of subscribers/fans/followers or whatever they are called on aparticular platform, but what you really need to know is how many you actually reach and how many are just hanging around. Focus on who reach, keep them happy, and then broaden out. Numbers are nice but meaningless unless they engage!

Engagement is the means to an end game – conversion -whatever that is for your purposes. This is why so many marketers fail at social media – they use the same high-power tactics they use for advertising. People on social networks don’t want your sales pitch you use on your site or at conventions. They want to talk to you and ease into what you have to offer them. Then, if you do your job right, the conversions are in the bag. Reciprocation goes a long way – just don’t waste your time on untargeted leads.

You don‘t know how valuable something is until you assign a value to it – social media is no different. You can say that a retweet is worth a dime and a backlink from a PR3 site is worth a dollar. It doesn’t really matter, just so long as you have a way to assess what you are doing. Just assign something so you can measure. You can even use a point system, and convert to dollar value later. Then you know your ROI and you can tell how effective your social media presence is.