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Social media has been all the rage for a while now. To define it simply, social media just means online platforms that give you a chance to get social – e.g. talk to your friends, interact with your customers, search for potential clients and talk about your brand.

Social media includes blogs, social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter; social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Stumble Upon and Reddit, video sharing sites like YouTube and more.

But when you have so many options, how can you decide which sites to use? Should you blog? How often should you blog? Does Twitter deliver the same results for every industry? Is your business supposed to have 60.000 random Facebook friends? Are you supposed to use LinkedIn?…

Yes, you do need a plan. However before you rush into making random trials, there are factors you should consider. Basing your plan on these factors will make your life easier. And implementing the plan will make your social media presence stronger.

What are these factors then?

Your Niche: Which area/topic/industry is your business concentrating on?

Your niche and the social media platforms you should be using are directly related. While some platforms are very generic and attract different types of users from all over the world, others can be industry specific.

Speaking of popular and generic platforms social platforms, Facebook is usually the first to come to mind. After all it has its own movie: The Social Network. The movie features the famous tagline: “You don’t get to 500 Million friends without making a few enemies.

While you probably aren’t not aiming for that many friends, this tagline alone is a good reminder of how almost anyone is on Facebook.

On the other hand, LinkedIn offers a more specific area. While there’re groups and communities in a variety of topics, the site’s main purpose is to connect like-minded professionals, whatever the industry. So it is much more career-related.

LinkedIn may not be widely known as Facebook, but then again these two sites exist for different reasons.

Your target audience: Who is your audience? What are their online habits?

The main reason for using social media is to find your target audience and connect with them. You need to build awareness, loyalty and trust. But to establish these, you need to find out where they are online. What’s their favorite social networking site? Do they prefer Facebook or Myspace? Do they log in regularly, e.g. a couple of times a day, or once a week? Are they active on Twitter? What’s their favorite method of spreading something they like? Do they use Digg or do they just prefer e-mail? Maybe they use a combination of these sharing methods.

Testing and interpreting your results: Which social media platforms are working better for you?

You found the relevant platforms. You also defined your audience and found out their online habits. Now it is time for some testing:

You need to look at the targeted traffic you received, your RSS readers, newsletter subscribers as well as your customers.  Which portion of your target audience bought your products or services? Where and how did they hear about you? Which sites did they come from?

To collect this date, you can simply make use of free (Google Analytics) and paid web statistics services. You can also place polls and surveys on your website to learn directly from your visitors. You might offer free e-books/reports as a reward for answering the questions so that they will be more inclined to spend time for your questions.

However interpreting the results is as important as these three factors. Sometimes  you might need to divide your target audience into specific groups. If half your visitors are using Twitter and the others think Twitter is a waste of time, you need to develop customized strategies for each group.

All these might sound like a lot of work, but they will help you build the brand you want and generate the sales you are dreaming about.