I can assure you of the daily impact of social media that happens without you ever knowing it, and of course, everyone’s heard the expert’s advice that you need a social networking profile on sites including Twitter and Facebook, and the longer you wait, the further you get left behind by your social media savvy competition.

So feeling the pressure to do something, you create a profile and start telling everyone about your products and services, but that is not the way to use the social media tools and applications that you have at your disposal, by repeating the established traditional marketing practiced for generations.

If you follow the traditional approach to your social media strategy, I can promise you, that you will do nothing but waste your valuable time, a precious asset you can afford to waste very little of, time you need to spend identifying and developing new business opportunities, dealing with your clients in person, face to face, and growing you business.

Younger Entrepreneurs and business owners must be extremely careful not to think for one moment that social media technology and the Web are going to replace face to face contact, which as great a tools as they are, the technologies can never do. It is important to understand completely that the exact same principles used face to face, apply directly to social media, with the method of contact and delivery, being the only real difference.

There are companies both large and small that have launched their social media strategies with profiles scattered across the social networking spectrum, yet something seems to be missing, and only with closer examination it becomes evident what the problem is. The networks and sites are filled with company staff members commenting and connecting with each other, but there isn’t a consumer in sight, no one to engage with, not the most critically important people, the customers.

Engagements with the customer is THE reason you carefully create and plan your social media strategies, to create and enhance your reputation, and strengthen the public’s perception of you as the local expert, the trusted advisor and go-to person, and finally engage your community and provide valued information and advice.

Try and understand the reasons why people are drawn to, and freely interact within the social networks, and it doesn’t take long to realize they are there to connect with each other, with family and friends, to engage and interact at different levels with others that are of like-mind and draw strength from each other, to share information and experiences, to share activities, all of which creates a great sense of community.

Entrepreneurs and business owners need to have a clear understanding of this human motivation and work closely with it to bring maximum efficiencies and return on investment by creating a clear and focused social media strategy for their business.

So the real question to begin with is what is the best approach to develop and strategically plan social media?

To begin with, you need to determine the reasons why you should have a social networking presence, and if the reason is only because everyone else is doing it and you don’t want to get left out, or your competition in the market is doing it and you have to compete, then stop right there. You want to develop and strategically plan how you will use social media because it gives you another powerful ad medium to contact and capture the valuable attention of consumers that are prospective customers, because it presents a great opportunity to take your important message to a potentially much larger market, for the big exposure it can deliver to you and your brand, and finally because you are an expert in your field and consumers are looking for an expert to advise, coach and provide motivation.

Start at the beginning by preparing a general strategy for social media, and then check out and decide on ways in which you can start building an audience. Determine answers to questions including will you begin by creating a website, blog, or go right to Facebook and MySpace, do you start using Twitter right away, and on what networking sites (i.e. LinkedIn etc.) do you plan to create profiles?
What is your brand and how do you plan to announce it?

Always remember to focus on you and your team helping others, and how you actually provide assistance, and your business is the one to contact when your service or products are needed, which in turn raises your brand value and associated consumer awareness, and increases your profile relevancy on the web.

Now the first step should be to set up accounts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube, check to see where you fit in the community, and be sure and upload all your contacts into Facebook and start the routine process of adding friends to your page on a regular schedule.

Establish yourself the goal of getting your initial personal contacts engaged and then begin to connect and engage with other local businesses and customers. While you are doing this, be sure and build a schedule to allocate time each week to this continuing task or you can be quickly overwhelmed when attempting to keep up with the multitude of conversations happening.

Then as your familiarity with the sites and networks grows (and it will), you might learn that some of them are not for you and your business, which is okay and part of the process, because at least you learned for yourself, and you are more informed about social media than when you started the process.

Now you are learning, and at this point you can start to build your blog, and remember that your blog web site is where all roads and associated customer traffic leads, and everything else you do should be designed with the goal of getting people to your blog and when there, interacting with you on your terms and “on your ground.”

It can be great just to have a Facebook fanpage that can drive traffic to your blog and web sites, but the effectiveness of both working together for you can create a synergistic affect for a highly successful social media strategic plan.

Lastly, remember that along with the creation of your blog site comes the continuing responsibility of adding content on a weekly basis, and you should allocate and schedule at least two plus hours for each week.

In addition, you need to use the same strategy for all the social network sites you use by allocating time during each week in your plan’s schedule to update your sites, and always remember it’s about continuing or perpetual engagement with your community as though you were actually face to face, not just about only promoting your latest product, and your social media strategic plan will lead you down the road to great success.