Social Media Marketing is the most misunderstood form of new media, costing companies thousands, if not millions, in wasted time and money.

The other day, I posted a blog with Social Media Networking Statistics and received several phone calls from people wanting help and a social media action plan. In this blog posting, you’ll find three tips to help you make sure your social media marketing efforts are headed in the right direction to help your business grow.

Be proactive and utilize social media marketing and social media networking to find or create your dream  job.

I‘m not that political, I’m just a business owner that loves to help my clients.  I pay in plenty in payroll, social security and unemployment taxes.  I guess you would call me a conservative.

As an entrepreneur my entire life I don’t understand why big government wants to increase taxes on small businesses.  From my point of view, albeit limited, if government cut taxes for small businesses, they would hire more people or pay their current employees more which would mean that they would spend more and everyone would win.  Okay, back to using Social Media Marketing to help with your job search.

I’d bet that many of you would classify your efforts with Social Networking as “social NOT working.”

It’s NOT working until you engage in conversations, spread your expertise, and most importantly “add value.” With hundreds of social media sites out there, it’s hard to maintain focus and really add value and stay active on every site.

So, start by focusing your efforts on these top five social media sites.  Here is a brief overview.

1. YouTube.com

This is the most popular video content sharing site. If you’re new to YouTube, go get your channel, which is to say go sign up for your account  – your account name is your channel name so select it wisely. It’s better to have a keyword phrase or your name than it is to have your name with a number or something obscure. For example, I have a few channels, but my main channel is www.youtube.com/primeconcepts (go subscribe now).   I also have www.youtube.com/fordsaeks, but too many people spell my name wrong so I send the traffic to the Prime Concepts channel. There are several other popular video sharing sites each with their own theme, but master YouTube first.  Then you can leverage your efforts on other video sharing sites, using sites such as www.TubeMogul.comfor starters. Share value-added content and watch your business grow.

Keywords Drive Traffic.

If you ever attended one of my Internet Marketing Seminars then you know that “Keywords Drive Traffic” is my online marketing mantra.  This short blog post is focused around the importance of using your keywords (and keyword phrases) for social media marketing.

This starts with understanding that keywords drive traffic, but with social media marketing it’s not the typical usage of driving traffic to get people to buy a product or service.

In fact, if that’s all you’re trying to do with social media networking than you are approaching social media with the wrong perspective and will waste a ton of time.

Social Media Marketing is all about relationships, adding value, joining the conversation and getting and giving feedback.

With Social Media the words you use in your profiles, account names, tags, blog titles & descriptions, user groups, and other posts all help you expand your digital footprint.

The top 5 Social Media sites that I recommend you focus your efforts are Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, LinkedIn and Your Blog. There are thousands of others and depending on your niche or focus area, there may be a few others that you want to leverage, but how many more in-boxes and accounts do you really need to manage?