With all of the fancy tools and sophisticated digital strategies, sometimes we forget how easy it is to make social media mistakes – and not of the typographical variety. From time to time, it is a good practice to go back to first principles, and make sure that what we are doing today actually makes sense.

Seven first principles:

1) They don’t care.  Prospects don’t care about you, but only care about how you can solve their problem. This means that your posts need to be relevant and valuable to your prospects. (Are they, really? Have you asked?)

2) Social Media for business is not personal Social Media time. If you have one hour of time per day, then this should be filled with activities that improve awareness, drive sales, or improve client service. Each activity literally needs to “audition” to be on your schedule: if it doesn’t make the cut, then stop doing it.

3) Consistency: Users crave consistency, and organizations are rewarded with increased followers, comments, and shares when consisency exists. Other channels have known this for years: there is a reason that TV news is always on at the same time every night, and that the morning newspaper (remember those?) always comes out in the morning.

4) Don’t ignore your main website: The ultimate goal of most digital and content investments is to drive users to your own site. But what happens next? Make sure that the site is built to “convert” to the next step on the user’s journey to commitment. And from a technology perspective, the site should be built on a social platform, so that content can automatically syndicate outwards, and into your social network.

5) Monitoring: Beyond looking for opportunities, monitoring can identify potential risks early. Monitoring can be as easy as setting up Hootsuite and Google Alerts for key terms.

6) Measurement: If you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it. Nor can you optimize your efforts and investment. Given the very significant amount of analytical data that is available online (and this includes within your own site), executing a plan without data-driven mid-course corrections is both financially wasteful and competitively stupid.

7) Don’t ignore the non-social: Just because you are on social media, doesn’t mean that all of your audience is. Or that all of your audience is on a particular Social Media platform. Social Media must compete with other marketing initiatives for your time and budget.

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