I believe in the business planning process as the secret to good management. That means you use a flexible business plan, reviewed and revised often, to manage strategy, objectives, measurements, performance, tasks, people, and basic numbers. And that’s as true with social media as with any other function in business.

Therefore, I’m recommending these three steps to manage your social media business activities using your business plan. I’m thinking mainly of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+, but I hope these three steps will apply to any other social media effort or platform as well.

1.Set strategy.
Strategy starts with focus and includes goals. It can include short- and long-term goals.

Think about what you’re going to do with social media in a business sense. Set realistic business objectives. Are you going to generate leads, answer complaints, engage with customers, or something else? Will you be doing all of the above? How will this relate to other functions and tools, like the rest of the marketing plan or the rest of customer service? Try to stay focused and be specific.

In terms of format, it doesn’t matter. The simplest form of strategy is a collection of bullet points. It serves as a reminder of priorities and goals when things get busy and hard to manage.

2.Set specifics.
Strategy alone isn’t enough. You need to add specific concrete information including how you will measure progress, what progress you expect to see, who is responsible for what tasks, and how often you’re going to review and revise.

For example, if your strategy includes Twitter, you should define what you’re going to tweet, and who will do it, what tools they’ll be using (for example, HootSuite or CoTweet or TweetDeck), and what performance measurements are important. The measurement might be posts, updates, likes, followers, connections, leads, customer incidents handled, or even the very trendy Klout score, which measures influence.

Be sure you have specifics you can track. Ask yourself how you’ll know, next month, whether you are on plan or not.

3.Manage results.
Just exactly like the rest of your business plan, the social media portions need to be managed, followed up, tracked, discussed, and revised regularly.

Schedule monthly meetings in advance. Invite everybody involved. List what numbers you’re going to be tracking and make sure it’s clear who is responsible for what.

When the meetings take place, start by reviewing assumptions, then review goals and performance measurement, one by one. Where things are better than planned, somebody should get praise. Where things are worse than planned, somebody should be prepared to discuss what went wrong and how to correct it.

Final thought: Does this sound familiar? As if social media belongs in your business planning process like every other important function in the business? Good. That’s what I hoped you’d say.

About the Author
Founder and Chairman of Palo Alto Software and bplans.com, on twitter as Timberry, blogging at timberry.bplans.com. Stanford MBA. Married 42 years, father of 5. Author of business plan software Business Plan Pro and www.liveplan.com and books including The Plan As You Go Business Plan, published by Entrepreneur Press, 2008.

These days, many businesses use social media for everything from e-commerce and advertising to brand management. The one in the three number becomes particularly surprising when you look at the breakdowns: only 7 percent of small businesses use microblogging like Twitter and only 8 percent use blogs. Another 8 percent use location-based networks like Facebook Places, Foursquare, and Gowalla.

The study revealed that the reason small businesses have been reluctant to implement social media tactics into their operational purviews is that they have found them to be ineffective, or falling shorting of their demands. Obviously it’s hard to know or generalize why this is the case, but one could proffer a guess and say that these companies are not using social media optimally. More on this in a minute.

Perhaps the most surprising statistic that emerged from this study was that as of 2011, slightly over half of small businesses had websites. That means that nearly half of the nation’s small businesses are sans websites-in other words, relatively invisible on the Internet. Considering the relatively inexpensive nature of Internet services like content management systems and hosting services, it seems nearly incomprehensible that business owners would not represent themselves on the most dynamic, growth-assured medium in the history of civilization. These businesses are depriving themselves of incredibly powerful tools like SEO (which only 27% said they used), crowdsourcing, and viral videos.

This brings us back to the reason why small businesses may feel that social media is failing them. Social media is not an end in itself. It is best used as a vehicle by which to transmit and promote messages. If a company doesn’t have a website or blog and is not practicing SEO in order to tap niche markets and target online consumers, social media is limited in what it can accomplish.

A more comprehensive study might try to mine the ways in which small business owners are integrating social media into their other online efforts, such as website optimization, blogging and SEO. Until then, it will continue to be surprising that so many small businesses still do not use social media to promote growth.

“We added quick-switch multi-profile management and unlimited analytics reporting to Statf.ly Pro to meet the growing demands of time-strapped agencies and brand managers overseeing content distribution and communications for multiple social client profiles,” says Statf.ly CEO, Bryan Crick. “Statf.ly will continue to grow its suite of management and analytics features with a usability-first philosophy that is both economical and efficient.”

Statf.ly enables users to store Twitter and Facebook history, keywords, and report annotations for up to one year, which is valuable for generating more compelling long term analysis, in depth quarterly reports and annual strategy reviews.

The Statf.ly platform provides users the ability to efficiently:

• Manage and distribute content on multiple social profiles
• Monitor keywords and conversations on Facebook and Twitter (Google analytics coming soon)
• Perform live searches on Twitter and Facebook
• Measure the results of interactions through a filtered set of data points
• Create and monitor campaigns via Bitly
• Generate unlimited one-click analytics reporting (for Statf.ly Pro)
• Collaborate with team members on data analysis with data point annotation, sharability and PDF export
• Store social data such as Twitter and Facebook history, keywords, and report annotations for up to 1 year

The StatFly platform makes the management, interactivity and analysis of social engagement strategies as effective and efficient as possible for business. For more information, visit http://statf.ly.

Networking
Facebook and Twitter aren’t just for Fans, they are also a great way for you to find others in the business and connect with them. Look for press members or reviewers who would be interested in your type of business and then follow them. If you remain active online, they will eventually take notice of you and possibly give you a few write ups in the local paper or magazine to help get your name out there.

Establishing Your Authority
Another part of social media is blogging, and through a blog you can help establish yourself as an authority over your industry. People like to buy from those who know their business and do it well so having a highly informative and trustworthy blog will make people more inclined to shop with you.

Creating Hype
In addition to using your social networking accounts to network with press and industry related individuals, you should also be using them to keep your prospective customers interested and engaged. Keep them waiting and wanting. Post updates about your opening, the new products or services you are adding to your line, and what you are doing to bring it all together. By keeping everyone involved you will have them eager to support you, and dying to get in when you open your doors.

Businesses today won’t survive if they don’t start incorporating social media sites into their every day operations. Shoppers today no longer simply want to buy their goods from an unknown business; they want an experience and want to feel as though they are connecting with a community when they offer a business their patronage. Give them what they want and create a strong following by signing up and staying active on social media sites and on your blog.

The ability to survey your online network is a strategic way to collect opinions and insights. Recognizing that today’s consumers are social beings, Zoomerang has released a new Facebook application that makes it easy for users to quickly get feedback from their online communities. The free and simple application allows you to post a survey or poll on your Facebook page and then quickly and effectively draw together feedback from the breadth of your social ecosystem. You can even include photos or videos in the question and answer options to make the choices more descriptive.

With Zoomerang’s Surveys & Polls for Facebook, you can ask your friends to help you decide on a myriad of topics—personal and professional. Ask your network to:

• Rank the Halloween costume most likely to help you win the “most frightening”;
• Identify trends and conduct business planning accordingly;
• Solicit votes for the next ice cream “flavor of the month” for your business;
• Determine what products or services your customers are most interested in

“Feedback is priceless in this day and age,” said Alex Terry, general manager of Zoomerang. “Consumers trust their inner circle of friends and family and, at the end of the day, their opinion is heavily valued.”

Effectively engaging with your network on social media allows you to get more insights and input from those that you already trust. Using Zoomerang’s Surveys & Polls for Facebook is one way to effectively gather and share these insights. Now is the time for you to make better decisions with others’ input-your Facebook friends are listening.

For more information on this free application, check out Zoomerang’s Surveys & Polls for Facebook at https://apps.facebook.com/zoomerangsurveys.

Where to Go
One such site is Tagged; it has over 100 million people already registered in over 200 countries and can help you find your special someone or a bunch of new friends who share your interests. It makes it easy to meet new people through social games, friend suggestions, browsing profiles, group interests and much more.

What to Do
Common interests are a foundation for many friendships, so you can use the site Tagged to meet people who have interests similar to yours. You can do so by looking for pages on the site that have people who have joined with that interest. People from all over the world use the site, so there’s almost bound to be someone out there who cares about the same things you do.

Another way to find new friends is through connections to your current ones. You may be able to find new people whom your friends are friends with, simply with a click of a button.

While friendship, dating and flirting can all be a part of this new approach to social networking, there’s much more to it. For instance, engaging social games can also be the secret sauce when it comes to social discovery. The popular Pets game, for example, garners over 5 million unique interactions a day. If you are looking for a romantic connection, a recent survey found 38 percent of respondents made a romantic connection through a Tagged social game.

One of the other favorite features of the Tagged site is a news feed with a difference. The “What’s New” feed cleverly lets you choose which member updates you see by filtering them according to location, gender and age. This makes finding new friends to meet around the block or around the world easy, while still maintaining tight privacy controls by following your account’s privacy settings.

When on the Go
For fun and friendship when you’re far away from home, the site Tagged has apps for the Android, iPhone and BlackBerry, and it recently launched a new mobile website for all other handsets.

Learn More
For more information about finding new friends in the social networking space, visit http://www.tagged.com.

The problem is, social networking comes with, well, problems. Users encounter lots of spam e-mail and phishing schemes. They’re also bombarded with copious-not to mention sometimes inappropriate-advertising. Researchers say many people are so concerned about security that they enter false information because they fear their real information could be used to steal their identities.

Perhaps most tellingly, an editor of technology site CNET wonders, as do many others, what she can actually do once she’s joined a site.

What’s the solution for people who like the links with other people that social networking offers but want more? It’s the logical, yet infinitely more useful, next step in the evolution of online connection: knowledge networking. Instead of networking for networking’s sake, knowledge networking’s goal is sharing knowledge and growing your expertise on subjects you’re passionate about-fly-fishing, politics, swing music, vegetarianism, you name it.

An easy-to-use online tool that already offers a great opportunity for knowledge networking is TrueThinker. Here’s how it works:

Let’s say you’ve got a passion for gardening. With TrueThinker.com, you can form a community about gardening and invite anyone anywhere who’s interested in gardening to join. In your community, you and other members share what you know about new varieties, planting schedules, garden design, pest control, etc. You can organize garden walks, send notices of horticultural events, chat using the messaging feature and more.

You can also build a “KnowledgeBank” on gardening. Here, community members save and share relevant information like helpful or thought-provoking articles, Web site links, photos, journals and much more.

Ultimately, you can use the site not just to connect with others but, most importantly, to grow what you and others know about nearly any topic. If you visit http://www.TrueThinker.com, you can sign up for a free, seven-day trial to take the site for a test-drive.

At the center sits Millennials, controlling their world via cell phones, laptops, iPods, and iPads. But, what are these elusive and complex creatures thinking? What do they care about? How strong is their purchasing power? And who will actually earn their discerning dollars, and why?

Whether you’re a business professional trying to decode the $43 billion youth market, a marketer looking for a message that connects, or an entrepreneur trying to develop youth-oriented products, Chasing Youth Culture and Getting It Right gives readers an unparalleled field guide to the newest wave of millennials and their mindsets.

Inside this unique book, you’ll meet four major tribes: the Wired Techie, The Conformist But Somewhat Paradoxical Preppy, The Always-Mellow Alternative, and The Cutting-Edge Independent, and understand their key traits, likes and dislikes, and what kind of adult they will likely become. The book includes many examples of companies, brands, and organizations who chased the youth demographic and got it right, or who failed to nail their audience. It also explains such concepts as Warholism, Tweenabees, Hand-me-ups, Massclusivity, The Facebook Effect, and Instantity.

Author and “teen whisperer” Tina Wells explains that millennials are “more wired, interconnected and aware than any generation before them, Millennials hold great power to launch and sustain brands that impact America’s cultural landscape – and the economy at large.”

Recent studies into the attitudes and spending habits of millennials yielded surprising facts, including:

• Tweens spend $43 billion annually, which translates to about $2,047 per tween
• Young people in droves are using the Internet for shopping: a whopping 84% of respondents in our survey claim to shop online regularly
• 61% of teens hear about new products online, while 15% still hear about them from friends
• 99% percent of teens have a Facebook page
• 36% of high school students claim that they would delay or forego college due to costs

Wells’ new book, Chasing Youth Culture and Getting it Right: How Your Business Can Profit by Tapping Today’s Most Powerful Trendsetters and Tastemakers, shares insights that can help businesses adjust their marketing efforts in order to take full advantage of these trends.

Among the topics covered in the book include:

• Traits of this generation’s four main tribes – the Wired Techies, the Conformist but Somewhat Paradoxical Preppies, the Always Mellow Alternatives, and the Cutting Edge Independents

• How technology is rewiring the New Millennial

• What Millennials buy and why

• The coming of the Global Mobile: How the New Millennials will shape the future

• Why Millennials don’t like the U.S. two party political system, very likely to pass away

• Importance and impact of concepts like Warholism, Tweenabees, Hand-me-ups, Massclusivity, The Facebook Effect, and Instantity

• Organizations who chased the youth demographic and got it right …and those who failed to nail this attention-challenged audience

• The top brands millennial deem as “luxury” – and those surprisingly not on their radar, and why

• Why some brands will be around when Millennials have kids of their own

About Tina Wells:
As the founder and CEO of Buzz Marketing Group, Tina Wells has spent the last decade keeping her finger on the pulse of what’s hot for tweens and teens – what makes them tick and their economic influence. Prior to becoming America’s youth expert, she earned a B.A. in Communication Arts from Hood College, and she’s currently a student at Wharton School of Business.

It’s a safe bet that this number will only increase; however, it will become increasingly more important to find ways to better manage the time we spend on the social networks.

If you want to be able to get anything else done, you’ve got to find a way to maximize the time you spend on sites like Twitter – and the good news is that there are a great many resources available out there that can help you do that.

In this short video (under 5 minutes), Traci shares some of her favorite Twitter-inspired resources. You’ll discover ways to leverage Twitter to increase local business, add audio to your website, showcase testimonials from your Twitter following, and much more.

“I am so excited about this tool. I have never seen an online merchant provide immediate monetary incentive to customers to Facebook Like their products. With our new Facebook Like & Save Feature, all of our clients have a new tool to take their online sales viral. If you think about the concept, it just makes sense. I suspect that one day this will be a standard feature in the ecommerce industry. For now, I pleased that we are the only ecommerce provider offering it because if gives our clients a competitive advantage,” explains Craig Ross, VP of Sales at Nexternal.

The tool is easy to use for both customers and merchants alike. When a customer visits a product in the merchant’s online store they will see the Facebook Like button and the sharing discount they receive for simply liking the product. Once they select the Like button they will instantly see their discount in the shopping cart. At this same point, the Like notification will instantly appear on their Facebook News Feed with a direct link back to the merchant’s online store. With a simple click the customer has posted product info on their Facebook News Feed because the savvy merchant provided the incentive for them to do so.

For Nexternal merchants, simply select the checkbox for Facebook sharing and in the preferences specify the Sharing Amount. Turning on Facebook Like & Save is that simple. Not only does this tool provide an instant source of links into a merchant’s store it also makes a merchant’s products more attractive to the search engines now that social signals are a factor they use in their rankings.

Napa Valley’s Goosecross Cellars was an early adopter of this marketing technology with the intent of enhancing communication and enriching the overall customer experience. Owner and President of Goosecross Cellars, David Topper, states, “We have been using the Facebook Like button in our Nexternal powered store for quite some time to successfully increase brand awareness. Now that we can provide added value for our fans with an immediate incentive, I think our Facebook Likes will grow exponentially. We love the fact that we can now reward our customers automatically for posting links about their favorite Goosecross wines and sharing their experience with others. This is a clever concept and is just another reason why we continue to partner with Nexternal.”

About Nexternal
Nexternal is a leading provider of web based ecommerce software. Founded in 1999, the company’s unique ecommerce system is used by hundreds of clients in many diverse industries. Nexternal’s software features an always-on screen shopping cart with integrated marketing and fulfillment tools allowing merchants to maximize revenue while minimizing operating costs.

Nexternal’s software was rated five out of five stars by Internet.com and is a three time SIIA Codie awards finalist for Best E-Commerce Software. Clients include Weyerhaeuser, USA Today, Ste Michelle Wine Estates, Taser International and Hershey. With locations in Carlsbad, CA, and New Canaan, CT, Nexternal provides industry leading customer service. For more information, contact Nexternal via phone at 800.914.6161 or visit them online at http://www.nexternal.com.