Social media is all the rage, and many businesses are finding it to be a wealth of leads for business growth. The most common reasons businesses use social media is for:

- To find leads
- To connect with those leads
- To maintain those relationships
- To spread the word about your brand
- To gain SEO points for your website
- To recruit new employees
It takes time and effort to create and maintain an effective social media plan, and particularly small businesses are finding it difficult to fit social media marketing into their regular business day. At Landau Design Reviews we have found social media to be a key component for helping reach out to new customers. Consumers have come to expect this sort of social media presence in order to have faith in the legitimacy of the business.

Why you must have some social media strategy:

1) There is no one-size-fits-all solution for social media
2) Social media is no longer an add-on. It has become a mainstream marketing tool.
3) You must have a plan for how to implement in order to be successful, and your company should have a social media policy.
4) Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Remember how quickly MySpace and Friendster faded into the past. You need to diversify your effort and watch the trends.
5) Just like every other marketing tool, effort is required. This is not a quick fix nor does it bring miraculous results overnight.
6) Companies working as a team have greater success than employees working as individuals.
7) Discussing and planning for various outcomes is best strategy. For example, let’s say you launch a blog, and then don’t write on it. What will be the ramifications? How will it be handled? It is important to know how to handle the successes as well as the failures in social media.

How to fit social media into your busy work day

It’s important to decide on how much time you want to spend before choosing outlets because if you want to stick with the plan, you want to be realistic about the time you can invest. Once you understand the time available and outlets of choice, then you can implement the Social Media Diet:

- Dedicate ½ hour per day to social media
- 20 minutes in the morning
- two 5-minutes in the afternoon
- Choose the main outlet you want to focus on and 1-3 other outlets
- Spend 15 minutes of your morning on the main outlets
- Spend the remaining three 5-minutes session on the primary outlet or the secondary outlets
- Be consistent, and you will see results!

Bonnie Landau is a web design and online marketing expert, specializing in creating optimized websites in Joomla and Wordpress. You can contact her at Landau Design Reviews.