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!

Despite the fact it is free and very easy to set-up, social media requires no less planning than other aspect of your marketing communications. With well thought out objectives, social media can be used to both protect and project your brand voice. Without clear objectives, it can be detrimental to your brand.

Set clear objectives

This is absolutely the most important step to define if you want to achieve social media success; what are you using it for? Make the big decisions before you launch, and plan accordingly. Are you going to build a community around your brand? Do you want to increase sales? Are you going to use Twitter for support?

Implement the four Ps of social media marketing

As you get started it can be helpful to keep in mind the four Ps of social media marketing: Perceive, Protect, Participate and Project.

Perceive

Perception is the most important factor, you need to know what’s happening online, and understand what it means for you and your business. Pay attention to what people are saying about you, and about your competitors – are they doing better than you? Worse? Is there anything in particular that they are commenting on? Maybe they particularly like a certain feature available with a competitor.

Protect

Likewise, if customers are making negative comments about you in social media, be prepared to protect yourself. The best strategy is one that is both pro-active and reactive. On the reactive front, either put them in contact with support, or assist them with the issue. On the pro-active front, investigate what steps you can take to avoid the issue entirely in future. Just be prepared to respond to your critics in some way.

Participate

It is important to participate openly and directly with online communities. If a customer points out a problem with your product on an online discussion board, respond to them directly. Whatever you do, however, don’t set up shill accounts under fake names – long-term members of communities will spot you a mile off. It shows that you care, and makes it clear that your company is constantly seeking to resolve any issues that may pop up. It is an excellent idea to set up Google Alerts, for regular updates of when and where your brand is mentioned around the Internet.

Project

Blogs, media sharing and social networking sites can be useful for promoting your business (just avoid the activities that lead to active opposition). Social media are also good for projecting your personal brand. But as you speak, remember to keep listening.

Be consistent

With so many different ways of developing your online identity or business marketing channels, consistency is key. This goes not just for the design, but also the name you use online. The more consistent you are with your name, the more likely it is people are going to remember you.

Here are a couple of examples…

Bad

•  Domain name: www.my-domain-name.com

•  YouTube: www.youtube.com/smith_video

•  Facebook: www.facebook.com/domaining

•  Twitter: www.twitter.com/james_smith

Good

•  Domain name: www.heartinternet.uk

•  YouTube: www.youtube.com/heartinternet

•  Facebook: www.facebook.com/heartinternet

•  Twitter: www.twitter.com/heartinternet

Initiate and engage

Give fans/followers something to respond and react to – don’t expect them to be responsible for starting discussions. You shouldn’t need to initiate every interaction, but always keep a list of ideas at the ready, or use related news stories as a springboard for discussion. Once you’ve got the conversation started, keep interaction going by asking individual users questions based on their responses.

Bring it all together

Don’t treat each channel as a silo, they will be significantly less successful if you do. Constantly reference each of them through the others and make sure they are all focused on achieving the same goal. For example, if we wrote a fantastic article about the latest web design craze, we would send out a tweet with the headline message linking to the blog post (“Become an expert in XYZ in 5 easy steps, find out more…”), update our Facebook status with a snappy headline and a little more info in the box linking to the blog post and announce it via twitter.