Use questions to find out what others are thinking. Instead of sharing your opinion, from time to time ask questions to see what others’ opinions are. Open the discussion for other people’s points of view. You could ask questions about what your followers are:

• interested in
• planning on doing
• reading
• talking about at lunch
• looking for in your product
• unhappy about
• confused about
• going to see at the movies this week
• excited about
• trying to avoid

You get the point. The list is endless.

If you have a business question you want answered you can tap into social media for yourself. Use LinkedIn. Guy Kawasaki, co-founder of Alltop, has this to say:

Get answers to tough business questions with a little help from your real friends. Small business owners deal with challenging questions on a slew of topics each day. LinkedIn Answers and Groups let you find answers to those vexing questions quickly by tapping into the wisdom of your network (LinkedIn tells me there are over 200 different categories on Answers including one dedicated just to small business and over 2000 groups on small business related topics). Wondering whether your recent office purchase is tax deductible? Check out hundreds of questions on related topics here.

In another post I’ll talk more about using LinkedIn for answering questions as part of your social media strategy. But for now, what do you thing about using questions as a way of getting others to interact?

When I teach management and communication classes, even time management, there is always a whole section devoted to listening. Listening is an important factor in developing and maintaining relationships, even in the online world of social media relationships of fans and followers.

One of the main tenants of listening in a face to face conversation is tuning into the person you are talking to and tuning out all of the other noise. Use this same skill in your social media conversations. Be a listener. Tune in to what others are saying: about you, about your product, about your industry, about something they are seeking an answer to, about something you could help them with, and then respond.

Be a consistent responder. This is how you get your name, your brand, your message out there. Subscribe to blogs that interest you, and respond. If something catches your eye, respond. Remember, you want people to respond and interact with you, so be the kind of person that responds and interacts with others.

If you have a Social Media Manager they can be your ears. You can have a plan in place as to what types of conversations to look for, what types of connections you want to pursue, and how to respond to ones initiated by others.

I remember my first day in my new school. I dreaded going. It was midway through the year. I was a gawky 6th grader moving from a Catholic school to a public school. I was complaining to my dad, “I won’t know anybody. I won’t know what to say.” And my dad said, “It’s easy. Just be yourself.” Maybe not the easiest advice for a gawky 6th grader to follow (if I remember correctly, I rolled my eyes at him), but it is the same advice I give you in regards to your social media updates: Be Yourself.

When it comes to your social media strategy, speak, write, and share content in your own voice. Status updates are not the place for sales speak, market mouth, hourly hype, or legal lingo. Save that for your Word docs. Be yourself, be real, be a human behind the screen.

If you have a Social Media Manager, have a clear strategy about your status updates, replies, consumer response tactics, and direct messages. Determine the voice for your brand – just remember: Be Yourself.

It’s true: You really can increase your customer base, strengthen your customer loyalty and build long-term relationships with your customers using social media. But you may not know how – or you may not have the time – to take advantage of all it has to offer. You may be overwhelmed with all of the social media venues you have to choose from. “Do I use Facebook? Twitter? LinkedIn? YouTube? Do I have to write a blog, too? Oh, no!”

This is where a Social Media Manager (or Social Media Assistant) can be of great assistance to you. Social media provides the opportunity develop a conversation strategy that can strengthen customer loyalty, build long-term customer relationships and and build your customer base. A Social Media Manager can help you create and execute the plan to achieve all you have in mind.

But what do Social Media Managers do? Apart from creating and implementing your social media strategy, they are your brand’s executive assistants and perform day to day tasks like:

1. Cleaning up your Twitter and Facebook communications and clearing out the spam messages, leaving those messages that are important to you… or as in the case in customer service, directing them to the appropriate individual or department in your business.

When you have multiple profiles (Linked In, You Tube, Facebook, Twitter) it can be a monumental task just to clean up all the junk requests and spam that comes into those accounts. Your social media marketing manager will do all of this tedious work on your behalf so you can focus your time on doing what you do best.

2. Grow your fan base or followers. In Facebook these could be your profile friends or fans in the case of fan pages, and on Twitter, these are your followers. In LinkedIn these are your connections.

It’s all about numbers: the more people in your network, the more people see or read your messages. Social Media Managers will find people who are your target audience, connect with them and then engage with them to develop relationships.

Finding the right people for your products and services is basic business strategy. Social Media Managers will work with you to understand your ideal client and put together a strategy of building a following on the right social media sites to attract your best prospects.

Just having a large number of friends or fans on a social media network is not enough. You want to keep these people engaged and interested. The best way to do this is by posting regularly and interacting with your followers. This is indispensable for your reputation on social media networks. After all, the whole point is socializing. Social Media Managers can create daily status updates on your various profiles on your behalf and distribute it to your prospects.

3. Tasks related to blogging and functions that pertain to the maintenance of a blog such as comment approval and clean up; and in some cases, content development.

They also make sure that your blog posts get the most “bang for the buck” by getting them out to various sites at different times of the week, and getting them exposed to your Twitter followers at different times of the day so more people will see it.

4. Reputation management: You know the old saying – a happy customer will tell one person about their good experience, but an unhappy customer will tell twenty! A social media manager can monitor what is being said about you, your products and and your services online so that if negative things are being spread, you can take immediate action.

These social media tasks can take as little as half an hour a day or up to two hours a day to do. You could do it yourself or have someone within the company do it, but it might not yield the results you are looking for if there isn’t a careful, thought out strategy and someone with the time to invest to do it right. You could hire a regular employee to just do social media, but it might not be cost effective with the amount of time required to keep up your accounts.

Remember, you don’t have to do it alone! This is why it would be best to simply hire a Social Media Manager to do it for you. You’ll get results faster and you’ll get to focus on more important aspects of your business – the things that only you can do.