We all know (or have heard) that social media marketing is supposed to vault your business to the next level, but the question lingers, the next level of what, exactly? Many marketers spend enormous amounts of time and energy building a social media presence, collecting friends and followers, and honing their online personas to a razor’s edge in order to cut through all the noise that is Internet marketing and have their voice heard. But how do you know if you’re succeeding? What does success in this arena look like? Let’s take a look at what some of your success measurements should be!

Number of Followers vs Quality of The Tribe

It looks good and most certainly strokes the ego to have thousands of followers and friends. However, for marketing purposes, this is missing the point slightly. How many of these thousands are spam or auto-generated? How many will actually engage in any meaningful way with you or your site? The truth is, not so many. Like anything else in the online world, numbers are inflated and should be taken with a grain of salt. Seth Godin has said that all you may really need is about 1000 people, but that they should be the right 1000 people! Really, how many can you actively engage with at any given time!

Be Involved, Participate, and Listen!

Get involved with others. Listen to their conversations and offer your own solutions. Give value before asking for anything in return. Make an investment of time and effort where your social media marketing efforts are concerned. This is not something you can leave to an automated solution and expect anything resembling good results. People participate in social networks to get to know you, not the latest quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson! Leave the automated stuff to the spammers!

Have Goals For Your SMM

Have clearly defined goals for your social media marketing and give them a decent time frame to bear fruit. Whether your goal is to become a social maven in a particular market or become known in a more general way, it does take a bit of time. Trust and dependable networks of followers aren’t built overnight!

If you haven’t, you need to know that this little site can make your life a lot easier! Not brand new, but vastly improved, Posterous enjoys a lot of attention from Google these days, but that’s not really why I like it so much. It’s very doggone useful!

Have you ever found yourself bogged down with too much work to do, and there’s a loud voice in the back of your head screaming, “You haven’t posted anything to your social network sites in days!!”  Sure you have, like this morning probably! We all want to get to it, but  it always seems to get pushed back. Have I got a solution for you!

Enter Posterous. On the surface, a mild mannered micro blog, akin to Twitter, Tumblr, and others, but underneath, there lurks a social media posting powerhouse! What this site allows you to do is to post once via email to Posterous, and it distributes your post to many different social sites, with links, photos, and everything intact! And this happens in seconds, through an email! Some of the many sites it serves are Twitter, Facebook, Facebook Fan Pages, Blogger, LinkedIn,  YouTube, WordPress.com, and any other blog you choose. There are 27 sites in all!

I’m sure you can see what a time saver this can be. You’re in your email anyway; why not update your social sites as well! And even if you aren’t, this makes hitting a bunch of them with a quick post drop dead easy!

Into several different markets? You can set up several different Posterous accounts! This can make your branding efforts a lot easier than they presently are. While utilities of this sort are not new, this one seems to have landed atop the heap, with it’s ease of use! Take a look today and see if it can help you!

Most new marketers look at the vast landscape of social media and throw up their hands in surrender. “How can I possibly keep up with all the services they tell me to?” is the common refrain. The truth is, it can be a lot to do. There are several good places you’ll want to have a presence, and to do them with any effectiveness, you need to be in there frequently. Today, let’s take a look at how we can do that, and not have to be chained to our computer or mobile device every second.

Remember, these services are entirely voluntary; you don’t have to do them. However, there can be a great deal of benefit from developing a following on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and a few others. It’s the time it takes to post and cultivate all of them that gets to most people. How do you manage it? Well, there are ways.

The first thing to do is to automate as much as possible. There are apps for your mobile devices, as well as software and plugins for your computer that allow you to post to several places at once, thus keeping the pipeline full and cutting three quarters of the time necessary to update all your services. My favorite sites that enable you to do this are Posterous, Ping.Fm, Social Oomph, and HootSuite. These allow you to post to many different accounts, most of them adding photos and videos to the mix as well. Some of them can schedule posts in case you need to be away for a bit and want to keep the flow going. Links stay intact, and about the only thing these tools won’t do for you is answer people. This you will still need to do, but with so much time freed up, it won’t feel like such a task.

Other tools like TweetDeck allow you to monitor posts on your accounts on one page, getting rid of the need to log in to each service.

It will take you a tiny bit of time to set all this up the first time, but once it’s done, you’ll find you’ve got more hours in the day and are actually looking forward to social media instead of dreading it!

There is a lot of buzz about using social media sites as a part of your Internet marketing game plan, and you may be either confused or overwhelmed as to what that actually means or how much time and effort this will take. Also, will the return on this time and effort be something you can actually calculate or will it seem as if you’re wasting time? All good questions, and we should look at some of the answers.

Let’s start with the last question –  is it a giant time suck? It can be. If you don’t have a plan in place to serve as a roadmap for what  you’re trying to accomplish with social media, then you could very well be wasting a great deal of time. You need to not only understand why you’re participating on a particular site, but the goals you have for it. Whether that means building huge followings on Twitter, Facebook, or wherever, or marketing directly to various social media audiences, you still need to be clear.

Where should you direct your social media efforts? Clearly the two big dogs in this space are Facebook and Twitter. You may want to separate your business and personal efforts on each of them — on Twitter by using multiple accounts and on Facebook by taking advantage of Facebook Fan Pages. These in particular are very good for marketers as you can use them in many beneficial ways. You can also send out to a large number of people who “Like” your Fan Page. All in all it’s a far better solution for business than your personal Facebook, which you should reserve for family and friends.

Besides those two sites, there are many other social media sites that may have some benefit for you. Some of these are sites like Tumblr, Posterous, MyBlogLog, Gather, as well as a whole host of social bookmarking sites starting with Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon. The point of all this is to have your content be seen in as many places and by as many eyes as possible! There are some tools that can help automate the process a bit and help you update to several places at once. Ping.FM and Posterous are useful for this purpose.

The takeaway here is to make sure you are taking advantage of the immense reach offered by social media. There can be much to gain here, but only with consistent application.