This post has be republished from the blog TheEssentialMarketer.com. Identifying Social Marketing Best Practices is a must for all marketers (B2B and B2C), but don’t just take what you read for verbatim. What really is a best practice? Wikipedia definition: A best practice is a method or technique that has consistently shown results superior to those achieved with other means, and that is used as a benchmark. In addition, a “best” practice can evolve to become better as improvements are discovered. The most important part of that definition is that “a ‘best’ practice can evolve to become better as improvements are discovered”. You have to remember that your company’s best practices should and will vary and most certainly will change depending on your industry, buyer persona, customer buying cycle, product set and many other reasons. More specifically, it will vary depending on what is your current marketing mix and strategy. There is no such list that is a one size fits all, it’s best to take the advice of others and integrate that into your own strategy and tweak it over time to best accommodate your goals. Once you have aligned your marketing mix to your goals and have instituted best practices, you will have a solid strategy that will be hard to refute . So with that out of the way, here is my list of best practices. Although this advice is specific to LinkedIn and Facebook, the advice holds true to most platforms. Remember also that Social Marketing [Social Marketing Defined] plays a specific role in your marketing strategy, so each of these best practices will present itself when applicable.

• You need to have a house rules section or disclaimer page on your company’s social media pages. Reserve the right to remove bad content, remove any offensive, discriminatory, racist, political, religious, etc. (Here is the one I wrote for Rackspace as an example, look at the bottom of the page http://www.linkedin.com/company/rackspace-hosting/products)
• Build an engagement system within the social media platform. This includes a listening mechanism and a response mechanism. Remember that this requires consistent feedback with a specified SLA that you hold yourself to
• Foster conversation by building engagement systems through chat, video, and sharing features that enable conversations among individuals and groups
• Use a multitude of media channels to increase engagement
• Build out a content calendar, post multiple times a week, preferably every day, vary your posts, have a clear CTA
• Focus on engagement, so ask questions, post helpful tips, link to articles/videos/content
• Have a CTA that drives them to your company website or to parts of your marketing funnel
• 78% of consumers like fewer than 10 brands – HubSpot
• If you blog at least 20 times per month, you get over 5 times more traffic than those who only blogged less than 4 times per month, so the more you blog, the more likely you are to have consistent unique traffic
• Use ...