Before you get started using Web 2.0 features as a way of increasing your exposure and of marketing your goods, you need to have a solid social marketing plan in place that will guide the rest of your efforts. Here are the reasons to do so.

Tip 1: Need a Goal

To achieve anything in business or in your personal life, you need goals and the social marketing plan can help you set the appropriate goals for your work. Think of it as a vacation planner. If you never chose a destination, you would never really know when you’ve reached the getaway spot. All of your efforts would be fruitless.

Tip 2: Creates the Roadmap

While we don’t want to overuse the vacation metaphor, the truth is the social marketing plan acts like a roadmap for your efforts. It forces you to decide what routes to take to reach your goals and that means you really have to think about what will work and what won’t before you waste money.

Tip 3: Research sites you want to target

A good social marketing plan will also include the sites you’re going to target with your efforts which means it forces you to start doing some research on places like Mixx.com and Digg.com, as we as YouTube, MySpace, and others so you can see what will work best for your needs.

Tip 4: Helps Keep You Grounded

If you tend to jump from one idea to another, having a social marketing plan can prevent you from “channel surfing” from one idea to another. It gives you an outline of what you need to be doing and helps you stay on track.

Creating systems for your business can be a real life saver in the long run. Even better when you have a system or procedure to follow because you do not have to remember all the steps, you wrote them down. I was recently challenged as to how I was going to provide written social marketing information to participants in a teleseminar. I personally love it when teachers and mentors provide a written guide to an audio program.

I learn better when there is also written material to follow along, Do You? It has something to do with the fact that we are receiving the information using two different senses; listening and reading.

Whether it be a live teaching or an audio CD I have found that my customers and clients learn more and retain the knowledge even better. I had been stressing about something this week and low and behold I found it in my notes, if only I had been smart enough to go to the notes first, because I had written it down.

Three benefits of having written procedures in place for your social media marketing…

1) You don’t have to remember how to do everything. I am sure you will agree that it is very frustrating to go and do something you have not done in a while and not remember all the steps. You know you did this before you simply cannot remember all the details. From that frustrating experience I decided to create index cards on how to do specific actions. Outline the steps and even in some cases what buttons to push and in what order.

2) Reduce your own stress. When you have things written down and stored away in a safe place you don’t have to remember! This little habit all by itself can really reduce the stress. You know you have to get something done, you haven’t done it for a while but you’re not concerned about it because you know that the directions are within your easy grasp. One of the more frustrating things about social media is that there is so much to learn and sometimes remembering it all is not easy.

3) You can easily outsource the task to someone else. When you are ready to have other people take care of your social media marketing you have great directions all ready to go. One of the biggest challenges with outsourcing is the initial training period and with your “notes to self” you are already half way there. OR you can take all of your notes and create an eBook or a workbook.