Social media is for having fun. I didn’t join Facebook to read or watch your advertisements; I joined to engage with my friends. So if your company wants to be in my world it had better be fun and interesting.

The overarching term "social media" has been sullied and has now become synonymous with self proclaimed experts telling you how important social media is for your business and why you should hire these “experts” to implement this for you. In truth the basics are easy: make something interesting or funny, or even better both and I’ll look at it and maybe even share it with friends.

You’re launching a new car and you want people to look at the specs, see the pretty pictures and read the reviews; so give one away. Offer a free prize draw entry if you retweet the information or like our Facebook page. Now you’ve piqued my interest.

Keep talking: engage directly with the people who have joined your campaign as free promoters searching for a win. Engage with them as an individual, not a company firing out slogans and product info, be a real likeable persona that people want to hear from.

Of course there are many options: create our slogan, design our logo, tell us why you want it, best YouTube video replies, submit the best tag line etc... Or “go Old Spice” and create a character/scenario people just want to talk about. The bottom line is making me want to do something for you.

When you hire someone to assist with Social Media strategy, they should do just that; assist you. They should: evaluate your current channels, suggest new channels, create an innovative strategy and an interesting campaign. Most importantly they should teach you how to implement them. You can hire someone to do the whole package and maintain the communications for you, someone to spend all day (and night!) responding to tweets and Facebook/YouTube comments, but really what you should be doing is learning to do this for yourself. Social Media is not going to go away, so learning how to leverage the best out of it is crucial to marketing your business.

If you’ve hired someone to work on your social media campaign and all they have done is set up a twitter account, take a not so deep breath....and fire them.