Social Media marketing – using Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Gowalla, Foursquare, etc needs to form part of any marketing plan across the marketing mix. Treating Social Media as a separate activity from your marketing is a No-No … In fact social media marketing should be integrated into every campaign or promotion.

Social Media marketing fits into new customer acquisition, customer retention, CRM, customer loyalty and anything else that customers do and thats true for D2C brands as well as B2B marketers.

To get started with social media marketing … don’t leave it to your corporate comms or PR person and you don’t need to hire a community manager who doesn’t know anything about your company.

The first step is to agree who owns all social media communications and let them have direct contact with the brand manager or product people … and secondly have your product and brand people setup their own Twitter accounts to track any mentions of your brand or their products.

The same is true for smaller companies and startups – don’t leave social media marketing to your receptionist or the intern – do they have a real interest in how many new customers you get each day? or how many customers walk out the door?

Rule 1 in Social Media Marketing – make it part of your marketing plans and don’t leave it to the PR person.

You can read all my interesting articles on social media to get some more ideas.