What are the hard and fast rules of a great social media campaign? Like most things in life, there isn’t a set formula for an excellent social media strategy. If there was, small businesses would become Fortune 500 companies overnight, and how often does that happen? Almost never.

Courtesy of make-noise.com

A great campaign hinges on several factors, and if any one of these key factors is absent, you’re looking at a lot of time wasted for little or no returns. The good news is, that these factors are under your control. Seek them out, and your social media campaign will take off into another dimension.

Rule #1: Your Dedicated Social Media Person

We’re not quite at the stage yet, where you can go and find a social media manager in the online yellow pages. Still, all the experts will tell you that without a particular person to manage your pages on a daily, or at least weekly basis, your strategy might fall flat. Social media is time consuming.

Not only that, but as a business you’ll need someone with excellent writing ability and grammar to handle your posts and connections. It’s not enough to be a bubbly person face to face, unless you’re Ashton Kutcher.

Find someone within your organization who can study social media and handle it as a permanent part of their job. Either that, or outsource to a company who can make it a success for you. There’s multi-tasking and then there’s running your business and social media campaign. Most of the time the social media campaign will suffer.

Rule #2: Plan Your Strategy

Without a social media strategy there’s no point in having social media pages for your business. Sure those 2000 followers on Twitter makes your company look popular, but have you actually sold anything to them yet? Strategy is all about research, trend following and data projection.

Use qualified information to determine what your business needs this year from social media marketing and set yourself goals to achieve. If you have no idea where to begin, take a social media strategy course and learn. This is not one of those marketing schemes you can teach yourself, and then make millions overnight.

Rule #3: Plan for Bad Online Reviews

It’s shocking how many businesses forget to include this in their social media strategy, but its there and always will be. Inevitably online you’ll have people who like you and your products, and those that don’t – and feel the need to blog, chat or comment about it to ruin your squeaky clean reputation. Have a plan of action in place, and actively debunk each comment as it happens. Don’t rage about it, or leave it stagnant. People read what others have to say, both positive and negative.

Rule #4: Being an Authority Means Being Humble

Sometimes trends change and your facts don’t, which can lead to others in your community correcting you, or being downright insulting of your last blog post. In this instance, its best to apologize, lol about it and move on – not start world war 3 on your social media pages, insisting that you’re right. Being a credited authority means being humble. You can be wrong – sometimes.

Rule #5: Record Your Social Media Progression

In order to improve upon the effectiveness of your social media campaign, you’ll need to record your progress on a monthly basis. How many sign ups did you get? What did you sell? How did you sell it? Track everything, and use the data at the end of the year to come up with your new and improved social media strategy for the New Year.

There are loads of other rules that you should follow, but we think these are grounds for a great campaign filled with community interaction, sales and success. What rules do you live by when creating and maintaining your social media strategy? List them here, and we’ll let you know if we agree!