We all know that social media has been taking the world by storm and everyone is trying to jump on board and be all social media savvy. Many businesses are thinking about implementing or have already executed a social media strategy. If you are one of these businesses, you may want to ask yourself these questions:

• If you already have a strategy in place, is it working for you?
• If you haven’t, are you taking the necessary action to put a strategy in place?

These are just some of the questions you may want to ask yourself before continuing to read this post. If everything is fine and peachy with your social media strategy and you are achieving all of your set objectives then keep on top of your game and keep sifting through all the great ideas to really crush it in 2010.

However, if you are in constant search of social media strategy improvement, then read on.

Here are 5 Easy Steps to a Successful Social Media Strategy:

1) Know Your Objectives

Before starting any social media initiative you have to really figure out what the purpose of your social media strategy is and have clear objectives in place. We all want our businesses to succeed and be profitable but that is simply not a clear enough purpose for your social media strategy to succeed.

You have to ask yourself and the team, questions that will drill down to exactly “WHY?” using these tools will contribute to the success of your business.

Do you want create a better customer service experience? Raise brand awareness? Generate 17% more business leads? Or most importantly, increase sales by 34%?  There are tons of other questions you can ask but always make sure you have a clear objective before jumping in and starting to post content on the web.

Watch the video below by Mitch Joel of Twist Image to get more ideas:

2) Fine Tune the Details

After figuring out your objectives for using social media, you have to fine tune your strategy. What tools are the best fit for your social media strategy? Will Twitter allow you to listen to your clients and help you improve customer service? Is Facebook going to help you engage with the fans of your brand and allow you to provide them with great offers? Which tools are you going to use and why?

But most importantly, how are you going to implement the social media strategy? Who will be part of the team? What are the time-lines and set objectives?

To help you fine tune details and pace your success, be sure to use your role models within your industry who had success with their social media strategy. A good example of this is Future Shop following Dell’s lead into social networking by creating a Future Shop (FS_Deals) Twitter account where they offer latest deals and exclusive offers. Dell has a similar profitable Twitter account -(DellOutlet). Do research on your competitors and see how they are using social networking tools.

3) Take Action

At the end of the day, no matter how much knowledge you might have or how many solutions you can provide, it all comes down to action. It is great to have clear objectives but over analyzing can also hurt you. This is exactly why you need to put the social media strategy you developed after asking all those important questions into ACTION.

However, listen first and talk later. Monitoring the conversation that is happening around your brand and your overall business interests should be your first action. After getting the feel of the conversation and the overall environment, start engaging with these people who you’ve been listening to, and build your presence with time.

If you are too small and no one is really talking about you online then listen to what people are saying about competitors and try to learn from those comments to make your business even better than the competitors.

And as Tom Peters said recently at the Art of Management conference:

Image Credit: arbinsky edited by Alex Ikonn

Be sure to always be listening to your clients, employees and competitors.

4) Is It Working?

Using social media tools can be very beneficial for you business but you have to make sure you are not wasting your time and money. Make sure to set evaluation periods for your strategy in order to be able to tell if it is working or not?

Have you achieved your set objectives? Are you getting closer to them? If you are not getting closer to your set objectives, instead of giving up the social media strategy all together and saying this was a total waste of time – Change Your Approach.

5) Change or Tweak Your Strategy

After noticing that your social media strategy is working or not, you have to tweak your strategy accordingly. Social media tools like Twitter empower your business to ask your stakeholders – What are we doing wrong and how can we make it better? Listen and learn from your successes? Mistakes? Your competitors successes/mistakes? And tweak your social media strategy accordingly.

Even if you are having tremendous success with your social media strategy, make sure to look out for emerging trends within the social space and adjust to stay on top of your game.