Like me on Facebook, follow me on twitter, link up with me on LinkedIn, and now pin my stuff on Pintrest.

Let me let you in on a little secret. Unless you have a great idea and are pitching (and get funded) by venture capital, it’s going to take a lot of work and strategy and a host of tactics, a lot of sweat equity and yes a little luck.

Here’s a list of what not to do in the social media arena.

Get all excited and put up a Facebook page for your business without a strategy. It’s ok to do that, just don’t expect much.

Post your daily deal which never happens to change. Or worse yet post the same damn thing 5 times a day.

Not engaging in conversations. Here’s a hint… it doesn’t always have to be about business.

Airing your political views. It doesn’t matter if your with us or against us, Democrat or Republican. Chances are good your going to alienate 50% of those following you.

Trying to hide a customer complaint or criticism or worse yet, ignore it. You can spend a lifetime building a decent reputation and it can be destroyed quickly if you ignore it or fight back. Not monitoring mentions? Oops.

Calling yourself an expert all the time. In fact, don’t do it at all. Let others give you that title, it’s more believable.

Thinking you can exploit social media profitably without a website.

Not having a strategy to capture names and email addresses.

There are only 3 reasonable expectations for your participation in social media.

1.) Increase your brand awareness by touching more people.

2.) Build customer loyalty by engaging your clients and customers with relevant information their interested in.

3.) Increase your sales.

The third one on the list is where most business owners start and stop. That’s why it’s 3rd on the list, not number 1.

So What is a Good Strategy?

That’s a good question and one not so easily answered. But there are some basic strategies and best practices and tools to test various promotions and engagements with your clients and prospects. From there it’s a matter of testing. What I’ve found is that owners of a business have an idea of what they want to accomplish but are unsure of the proper steps and often times try a few things but are unsure of how to measure whether a certain tactic has paid off.

If you’re stuck on number 3 but it’s in the first position on your list and your not getting the results you anticipated give us a call for a comprehensive discussion on a strategy and some best practices that is right for your business.

IDX basically allows real estate agents to take all the listings in their mls and display them on their website. About 15 years ago I wrote a program to allow auto dealers to display their inventory on their website. I took that program and modified it for real estate agents. Since then we have installed our property search program on hundreds of agent websites across the country.

Because we have been so involved in helping real estate agents we have all but neglected the local Pueblo community and our family of websites.

Out of frustration with the national real estate website vendors, and the maturity of the WordPress blogging system, we’ve been working over the past several months to offer websites again based on that platform. I’ll be writing more about it in the near future but for now, what I’m trying to say here is that we are excited again to be offering web site design. We’re going to help local businesses get their website on the web, or fix their unproductive sites and be their virtual assistants so they can concentrate on what they do best, and leave their web maintenance to us.

Stay tuned …