Before you get started using Web 2.0 features as a way of increasing your exposure and of marketing your goods, you need to have a solid social marketing plan in place that will guide the rest of your efforts. Here are the reasons to do so.

Tip 1: Need a Goal

To achieve anything in business or in your personal life, you need goals and the social marketing plan can help you set the appropriate goals for your work. Think of it as a vacation planner. If you never chose a destination, you would never really know when you’ve reached the getaway spot. All of your efforts would be fruitless.

Tip 2: Creates the Roadmap

While we don’t want to overuse the vacation metaphor, the truth is the social marketing plan acts like a roadmap for your efforts. It forces you to decide what routes to take to reach your goals and that means you really have to think about what will work and what won’t before you waste money.

Tip 3: Research sites you want to target

A good social marketing plan will also include the sites you’re going to target with your efforts which means it forces you to start doing some research on places like Mixx.com and Digg.com, as we as YouTube, MySpace, and others so you can see what will work best for your needs.

Tip 4: Helps Keep You Grounded

If you tend to jump from one idea to another, having a social marketing plan can prevent you from “channel surfing” from one idea to another. It gives you an outline of what you need to be doing and helps you stay on track.

Social networking is a form of advertising that has been growing almost exponentially over the past decade. It is a great way to generate good rapport with your customers and positive publicity around the Internet. Social networking is targeted and helps bring in repeat customers.

At the time of writing this, the most popular social networks are Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Having an account on one or all of these social media websites is essential for an effective social marketing campaign. Social media sharing websites include YouTube, Y! Video, Metacafe, AOL Video, Blogger, and WordPress. They are all different forms of social media that are useful for social networking and viral marketing.

Once you create an account for a social network, the next step is to target a potential audience. What kind of lifestyle do your customers live? What are their hobbies, occupations, and interests? Are there regional limitations to your product market span?

After picking your target audience, it is time to create the message you want to get across. What would you like to do for your guests? Motivate them? Inform them? Guide them? Connect them? Create the content on your social marketing website to reflect your chosen purpose. Are you planning to market mainly business to consumer (B2C) or business to business (B2B)? Either way, the end goal is customer loyalty and repeat visits to your e-commerce website, but the way of going about this may vary depending on which group you plan to make your target audience.

Since online marketing is not traditional marketing, it is important to remember that followers generated through online marketing campaigns are largely going to be those with whom you are able to generate the best rapport. It is important to be authentic and genuine in what you write as well as the way you write it. Use a friendly and conversational tone on social networking websites. At the same time, you want to be an expert on your subject! People will come to you for information and advice, and providing them with it will help you generate rapport with your visitors. Be a marketer, but do not act like a salesperson. The idea is to get people to come to trust your company name because they trust and like you and your online presence on social networking websites.

Lastly, social network advertising is measurable if you take the time to track it. Track the time spent developing social network profile content, messages, and social network promotions. Keep a log of the size of your network on various social media websites, whether they are “friends” or “followers” or “fans” of your particular social network profile. Your return on investment, or ROI, is the money invested in marketing divided by the number of followers on your profile. For example, $1100 spent on marketing divided by 440 followers is an ROI of $2.50 per person influenced.

Take the time to learn about social media and attract followers online through social network websites like Facebook and Twitter. These social media websites are not just for finding your long-lost high school friends; social network websites are a great potential source of traffic to your website.