Many of us have built a personal Facebook page. Maybe we have looked at Twitter or started to collect colleagues on LinkedIn… but how to do something actually useful for your business in the world of Social Media Marketing (SMM)? You could build a business fan club page or a group page and ask all your Facebook and LinkedIn friends and colleagues to “like” it. You could start posting Tweets and see if anyone follows you on Twitter….but first there are a few things you should do in the way of planning in order to maximize your time and effort.

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1. Define the goals and objectives of your social media presence. For most of us this would be to build our patient base and our “reach” into our communities.
2. Define your target audience; who is your favorite type of patient and what will you offer them through your social media presence?
3. Figure out the follow-up activities you will do to convert Facebook friends and LinkedIn colleagues into patients (you will send them some useful information or articles or ebooks; you will call them; you will add them to your email marketing list to tell them about special offers, etc.)
4. What is your budget in terms of money and time for working on social media marketing projects?
5. How will you measure your success?

Know that if this is going to work you must participate in Social Media regularly with valuable content for your readers. Here are a few things to think about with regard to the life span of your posts:
1. The life of a Twitter post is, perhaps, one hour
2. The life of a Facebook post is, perhaps, a day
3. The life of a Blog or a YouTube video could be a very long time, months perhaps, and either of these can be linked to all the others.
4. Google likes and catalogs your Blogs and YouTubes, but it does not search Twitter or Facebook.

So, to use Twitter effectively, it is only to point your followers to something else you’ve posted elsewhere and you must post every other day, or at least three times per week for followers to remember that you exist.

To use Facebook effectively, post links to or comments about all kinds of cool (and relevant) things you find elsewhere on the internet. Also post links to any blogs that you write or videos that you create, special offers on your website or interesting news about your clinic. Post at least weekly, but the more often the better.

LinkedIn uses and posts are similar to Facebook…except they are more business to business than just for regular folks and customers.

A Blog (create on Blogger, WordPress, BlogIt, or on your own website) is, perhaps, the most versatile tool you have in the world of Social Media Marketing. It can be linked to all of the social media sites you use and more, and Google likes blogs so you can gain Twitter Followers, Facebook Friends, LinkedIn colleagues, and website visitors by posting blogs regularly. Post at least one per week. This is actually a time saver, as you can post a blog, then link it to any other social media sites where you have a page. Also, blogs can get to the front page in Google faster than your website will, so don't underestimate the power of blogging.

My suggestion is, whether or not you have started with these sites yet, that after you define your goals, audience, and the activities that you can commit to, pick one or two of these forums (fora?) and work on that for awhile to see what response your materials get, before jumping in to all of them. You could spend all day in the black hole of cyberspace.

NEXT Blogs: What type of posting will you do and how to create content, YouTube rules, Some Strategies for Social Media success.