Social media is bringing people closer with unimaginable speed and is a popular tool used in promoting businesses. Social media helps you to extend and expand your reach and increase the visibility of your company.

All this can be achieved by building meaningful connections with customers and other businesses through social media. Social media basically helps market your company in the digital sphere.

Trying to manage your contact list through social media doesn’t mean just throwing in a Facebook page and a Twitter account, and never using it. Social media is more of a strategic and engaging marketing tool. Here are few tips that could help you set up the right way on social media.

Defining your purpose
Firstly, try to figure out your agenda for using social media. This is how you can formulate the perfect strategy to achieve your goals. Figure out what your objective is. It could be to increase awareness about your brand, or it could be about getting more customers on board. To have a clear idea of what you want to achieve using social media tools is vey necessary.

Always start small
A common mistake most people make while starting out on social media is creating accounts in every networking space. Avoid doing this and start small as having numerous accounts will only hurt you in the long run. Every network isn’t important, so don’t spread your rand everywhere.

Choose a site which is applicable to your industry. For example, restaurants can start out on Foursquare and clothe-lines on Facebook as they can target audience suitable for their brands.

Know Your Audience
Marketing is pointless if you’re talking to the wrong crowd. With respect to your brand note down what your ideal customer would be like. Basically, make an audience profile for your brand. These details can help you create a content strategy to reach out to them in an effective manner.

Be social
Using social media to expand your business is all about having fun, along with the work. Engage and participate in active discussions and conversations with your audience. This will help you market yourself in a better manner. It is also called as brand building. Everything must be done in the point of view of a customer. The businesses that have succeeded using social media marketing strategies are the ones who are most conversational and entertaining.

Avoid focusing only on sales
Follow the 80/20 rule, which states that almost 80 percent of your revenues come from 20 percent of your customers. Keep this concept in mind and take advantage by building real connections and relationships with your audience. Never focus on the sales as sales will eventually happen after you build good customer bonds.

Be patient
Social media can build your or break you, so it is probably very important to be patient. Social media marketing will certainly not give you results overnight, but the wait is worth it as the end result will be quite overwhelming.

All you have to do is formulate a brilliant plan as part of your social media marketing strategy and patiently wait for it to show you progress.

About the author
ZK is an expert associated with WebTrafficROI, which is a web marketing blog aimed at people who are interested in web business and blogging. The blog also helps entrepreneurs, bloggers, companies and small businesses to make their business better on the online forum.