A Social Media strategy is not putting sharing buttons on each of your blog posts.  You have to actually engage with your audience and offer unique value, plus it doesn’t always have to be about selling your products or services.  Your content needs to resonate with the people in your audience if you’re hoping that they will share it.

There really isn’t enough hours during a day to use every Social media network, it would be a full-time job and if you’re like me you’ll be wearing too many hats when running your online business to do that.  Figure out where your audience hangs out and start using the same social networks as they do.

Connect with people, reply to what they say, offer answers to their questions, share content that is valuable and creates relationships.  Don’t always make it about selling or promoting yourself.  Be the real you instead of trying to act like a professional company.  Stay try to yourself, your beliefs and your business goals.  Everybody relates more to a person rather than a lifeless corporation that always markets themselves.

Just be yourself.  Because, after all this is easy to do, since you’re normally yourself, right?!  Also, your brand and its tone will be more relatable if you are yourself.

You’ve also got to be able to adapt to change quickly.  Social media is an ever growing and changing beast.  Just because something worked a week ago doesn’t mean it will work again.  Your audience might jump to another network all of a sudden.  You need to stay up to date with how your audience is interacting with social media and also how the social media network is interacting with the world around it.

Just with any social situation, it does help to stand out a little.  But you’re going to need to stand out even more on any social network, as there are many, many other users trying to grab the attention of your audience.  If you want to have your content shared and discussed (hopefully in a positive way).  You’ll to need to think about how your content will offer value your audience?  What unique value do you bring to each conversation?  Social media is all about relationships. and relationships aren’t built by shouting out marketing at people or continually sharing other people content or simply using your social media account as a feed for a different social media account (i.e using your Twitter feed to simply repost Pinterest photos, or your Facebook feed to post your tweets).

Effective social media usage for your online business is more about building relationships than selling so be generous, genuine and engaging with your audience.

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