This post forms part of our ‘5 Days of Social Media’ contest, helping you to get more out of social networks as well as giving you the chance to win lots of great prizes!

It’s easy to carried away very quickly with social media and most people jump straight in at the deep end. Whether you’re a social media veteran or getting to grips with social media is on your to-do list, a strategy is essential. If you’ve already established your business on social networks, it’s still not too late to develop a monthly or yearly strategy that you can revisit and adjust as required. Read on to find out more.

Choosing a network

The most important thing to remember is not to over-stretch yourself from the start or you risk burning out quickly. Start with one network and develop it out for at least a few months before you think about beginning another. Once you have an established presence on one social media website, you then have a base of followers which you can encourage to join you on other websites.

It’s easy to create profiles on every site you come across, but you run the risk of social media graveyards with lots of dead ends and visitors being neglected. Social media can be the first impression anyone gets of your business, so make it count!

If you’re unsure which network(s) to base yourself on, you may find the following articles useful:

• Making social media work for your business

• Choosing social media channels for your business

The obvious choices are Twitter and Facebook, but if you’re looking to use social media to drive sales you may wish to try some of the less popular networks. They can yield some of the best results due to lower competition, but it really depends on your business and your approach.

Forming a strategy

Even if you’ve been using social media for your business for ages, these questions are worth revisiting from time to time as you refine and develop your strategy and set yourself new goals. Social media is always changing, and you need to change with it!

The questions below are also useful for advising on or assessing social media strategies with clients just starting out.

Your strategy should answer key questions such as:

• Why do I want to use social media and what benefits will it have for me?

• What will I be sharing on social media and why?

• How much time do I want to spend on social media each week?

• Will I be driving conversations, responding to questions people ask me, or both?

• Will I be creating a personal brand or a company brand?

• How will I integrate social media with my website?

• How will I track my success?

Once you’ve developed the main points, create a list of goals. These can be small goals such as ‘Get fifty targeted followers’ and ‘Update at least three times a week’ or long-term aspirational goals such as getting a specific number of new customers, visitors or sales.

If you’re utilising multiple social networks, you may want to make a separate plan for each of them. This will help you avoid repeating yourself too much and also allows you to take the best approach for each type of site (e.g. Facebook is great for posting images, and you’ll want to post very infrequently to avoid people unliking your page, but you’ll want to post much more on Twitter and use links to articles to establish yourself as an interesting person to follow).

Tools

There are thousands of different tools out there with all kinds of features. You may use several, or none at all depending on your use of networks and your business. You’re more likely to need management tools if you’re thinking of scheduling or automating posts, or posting the same message to different networks.

Select social media management tools to complement your strategy. It’s best to opt for a free tool (or a free trial) to start with so you can find out what your needs are. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the variety of options, but it’s worth trying at least two or three to get a feel for what you can do.

Take a look at our blog posts on tools and resources:

• Our top free Twitter tools and resources (Part 1):

• Our top free Twitter tools and resources (Part 2)

• 7 fantastic WordPress social media plugins and widgets

Social icons used in this post can be downloaded here.