After working diligently on our own social marketing campaign for several months now we wanted to share our top 5 social marketing secrets.

Talk about what you know

The most powerful ingredients in social media are creativity and personality. They are the key to having a viral, engaging message and to becoming a trusted resource in the eyes of your social media audience. Your creativity is also essential to discovering useful strategies and tactics so do not be afraid to try something new or go against the grain.

Engage and listen

 Focusing too much on you and your message means that you're simply talking at your audience, not talking with them; so put your message farther down on your 'To Do' List. The primary focus should first be on your customers. Hear what they are saying; see what they're up to. Once you've been able to connect, and figure them out, then see how you can help.

Set Attainable Metrics

Setting up and agreeing to metrics on your campaign is critical to your success. The goal of any social marketing program is to be able to tie your overall business goals into what's happening with your social media plan. Choose metrics you feel are achievable and appropriate based on the companies' goals.

Be Reactive to Analytics

 This includes not only measuring but also reacting to changes and to the conversation. If you're listening but not doing anything about it it's not effective. You may also need to scale up or down your level of involvement based on how the campaign is going, what your business is looking to get out of it and who your audience is.

Add Useful Services

 We recently launched a version of Business Locator that is integrated into Facebook so companies can offer a useful service to customer's right from inside their fan page. This helps to make your page a resource, not only with information but with services too. Other ways to make your page more useful are to offer coupon deals and promotions to your friends/fans. This keeps them excited to check up on your page and see what's coming up next. Chick-fil-A for example does an excellent job of this.

So what makes your social media strategy run smoothly? It starts by educating your audience, listening to the conversations going on in your community, setting metrics that work, reacting to your metric's analytics and adding services to make your page a resource to return to!