•    Stay consistent; post on a regular basis so people want to keep coming back; your customers are voracious in wanting information from you.

•    Insert personality into your posts, tweets and blogs. You are representing your company but speaking as a person; people want to do business with a person, not a faceless entity. But don’t overload their pages with useless dribble about Great Aunt Martha.

•    Make your posts relavent to your audience; find out what they want to know about and post about that.

•    Add pictures; people love them! Use a tool such as Twitpic. Also post pictures on your blog or add links to Photobucket.

•    Be interactive; respond back to posters, reTweet; it builds relationships, which is what this is all about, and it gets your name and tidbit about you in front of other potential people.

•    Be honest and upfront; be prepared to respond to upset people or grumblings; admit your mistakes.

•    Collect and present information for people; post links, stats, reports; people are busy and like someone who can aggregate this information for them.

•    Use various forms of social networks, but funnel them back to your main platform (your website) through links and info.

•    Encourage and build relationships with the movers and shakers in your industry; they’ll be ambassadors for your brand and come from a real voice.

•    Post stories and tidbits about real-life experiences with your product or business. Share those that extend and shape what you want people to know about your product, yet in a friendly way.

•    Let the person who digs this type of networking the most handle it. That may be a junior recruit; watch them initially and periodically check on them, but if they are doing okay, let them go at it. If the person likes these sites, they are more apt to post and not keep putting it off.

•    But also let the CEO/Owner’s voice be heard. Again, people like to know who is behind the company.

•    Focus on the most appropriate channels for you; don’t try to be everywhere. Determine where your customers are most likely to be and use those sites.

•    When trying to measure return on investment, look for ways to measure that make sense to medium: not just number of followers but number of people that requested more info, number of people that used a coupon associated with that site, number of people tweeting or posting about your company, number of new ideas or steps implemented based on customer suggestions.

•    For Facebook, set up a business page not just a personal profile. Facebook rules state against using the profile accounts for businesses and they can be pulled down.

•    If you have a follower on Twitter, make them a friend on Facebook or ask them to be a fan of your page.

•    Use the various third-party applications such as TweetDeck that can organize posts or update several sites at once.

•    Set up an RSS feed so whenever you post a new blog, it will also post to Twitter.

•    Set aside dedicated time to work on social networks, but also post when something hits you.

•    Subscribe to other feeds and follow other people; the goal is to interact and network.

•    Don’t feel like you have to follow everyone that follows you.

•    Use link shortening services such as tinyurl or the link shortener in TweetDeck to avoid using your whole post limit on links.

•    When posting videos on YouTube, keep them short, 15-30 seconds, or break them down into parts.

•    Don’t make your YouTube videos outright ads; make them enticing and interesting while still mentioning your company.

•    When uploading videos, post or Tweet about them, blog about them, paste a link on Facebook, email the link to people, etc.

•    Pay careful attention to your video title and tags to help the videos show up higher in searches.

•    Use certain sites for building business and building contacts. LinkedIn is good for finding resources, learning from others, building connections and getting recommendations.

•    Watch for spam or negative posts and respond quickly and appropriately; use the display your customer service.

•    Use social networking sites to identify areas of growth and test new ideas.

•    Use LinkedIn or Facebook to recruit new employees.

•    Link your blog to all your other networking sites, as blogs are very attractive to search engines.

•    Consider a shared blog among retailers in your town.

•    Use your store or company name as your Twitter username and your Facebook business page name.

•    Include your website link in your blog, Twitter profile, Facebook page and others.

•    Use Twitter for more quick, immediate posts; Facebook for items with longer lead times.

•    Tweet or post about new product you ordered at the show encouraging people to shop as soon as you get the product in store.

•    Personalize your backgrounds in Twitter to enforce your brand identity.

•    Don’t just talk, but listen; pay attention to what others post.