It's time to start utilizing social media marketing in ways that will put a positive spin on your bottom line, customer happiness, customer service capabilities, lead generation, analytics, product development, and much more. Using our ebook, The 6 Principles of Social Media Marketing, as the inspiration for this post, here are 10 tips for each of the six areas of social media marketing: social listening, social content, engagement, social ads, measurement and workflow and automation.

Social Listening

1. Listen to your customers' comments and suggestions
2. Listen to stop issues before they escalate
3. Listen to find new customers
4. Listen to understand prospects' challenges and pain points
5. Listen to determine what your competition is doing
6. Listen to find new markets
7. Listen for product development and market research insights
8. Track what people are saying about your brand
9. Create reports for your R&D department
10. Provide information to those seeking it

Social Content

1.  content people trust
2. Create content people want to read and share
3. Create valuable content
4. Create actionable content
5. Be relevant with your content
6. Update content in real time
7. Participate in a meme
8. Use imagery
9. Share your content on social channels
10. Ask your audience to create content

Engagement

1. Reach out to make customers feel special
2. Tell compelling stories
3. Help customers before they ask for it
4. Use multiple social channels to connect
5. Ask your audience to engage and share
6. Create a loyalty program
7. Use a CRM system to keep track of customer engagement
8. Engage across departments to solve internal challenges
9. Use social data to determine your next steps
10. Be authentic in the way your engage

Social Ads

1. Have a strong call to action
2. Entice your audience to share your message
3. Encourage peer-to-peer recommendations
4. Promote well-performing content
5. Gather information about potential customers
6. Ask your audience to opt in to your message
7. Encourage participation in contest and promotions
8. Work to reduce cost-per-click
9. Promote "likes"
10. Modify content that isn't working and try again

Measurement

1. Create measurement dashboards
2. Measure shares
3. Measure leads generated
4. Measure sales data tied to social efforts
5. Measure web analytics
6. Measure SEO
7. Measure ad conversions
8. Create reports to share with internal teams
9. Gain actionable insights
10. Determine influencers

Workflow and Automation

1. Keep your data open and available internally
2. Use workflow and automation to solve problems
3. Use it to field customer service needs
4. Use it for community management
5. Involve customers and employees together
6. Choose the right tools for your organization
7. Save workflow time with automation
8. Improve response time
9. Combine metrics, engagement, content and customer data
10. Gather research and insights

We’ve created a long list here to pick and choose what works for you. What would you add or subtract? To learn more and expand on some of these tips, check out the free ebook, Six Principles of Social Media Marketing.