If you’re a marketer, or even a normal human being, you may have experienced FOMO. Characterized by feelings of anxiety, often accompanied by itching thumbs and tunnel vision, FOMO is on the rise, spread from marketer to marketer in discussions of social networks like Ello and Snapchat.

Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) is the sinking feeling that you may not sign up in time to get your prefered username. (I’m a fellow sufferer. My only regret in life is not getting my full name on Gmail.)

How do you figure out which new social channels to try?

In 20-plus years as a marketer, I’ve only worked for one company that had a whole lot of extra marketers sitting around without enough to do, and they ended up laying us all off and went out of business. Most marketers (and small-business owners) are too busy to waste time. So how do you decide if the Next Big Thing is a cure-all or snake oil? Here are a few suggestions that may help ease your pain. Take only as directed.

Get your username

First of all, there’s no reason not to reserve your username by signing up on new channels. More than one prescient geek made money by selling companies their own names as URLs, registered in the days before companies caught on to the whole Internet thing. This doesn’t mean you need to create a profile and start posting; just grab it and park it. But don’t be greedy, and don’t be shady. As tempting as it might be to usurp a competitor’s company name, how would you feel if that was discovered and made public?

Understand the channel before you start using it

My friend Jim Tobin wrote a book back in the olden days called “Social Media is a Cocktail Party,” and that title pretty much still sums it up. You wouldn’t walk up to someone at a party and shout, “Hi! Do you want to buy my stuff?” Likewise, you wouldn’t strike up a conversation about the meaning of life through the speaker at the fast food drive-through. (Well, maybe you might after a very long cocktail party.)

You need to understand the culture, language and guiding principles of a social network or content channel before you can engage on it effectively. You also have to watch and see how the channel evolves. For many brands, Twitter started out as a place to listen to what people were saying and engage with super users and fans. For many of those same brands, Twitter has become a major customer service channel. Social channels evolve and you need to evolve your strategy along with them.

Listen to your customers

This one should be simple. Are your customers active on the channel? If so, how are they using it? That should tell you a lot about whether or not you need to be there. Are people asking questions about your industry, your field or your company? Or are they sharing cat videos? Or both? (If your business is creating cat videos, I don’t know what to tell you.)

Decide how you will define success

One of the biggest mistakes marketers make (in any channel, not just social media or content marketing) is not knowing what they want to accomplish and how they will know if they’ve accomplished it. Everybody on your marketing team should have a clear set of bottom-line business objectives they are tasked with supporting. Only then will you be able to determine if a new social channel is worth exploring, and more important, be able to determine if the effort was worthwhile.

For instance, if you’re a lifestyle brand trying to raise awareness among 18- to 24-year-olds, you’re going to have a different set of success criteria than a brokerage firm trying to attract high-level investors. It’s when brands forget that distinction that they waste their time and resources (and look silly).

Prepare for the inevitable collapse

Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but nothing lasts forever. Over the last decade, I’ve posted to Typepad, Friendster, Wordpress.com, Twitter, Facebook, Posterous, Tumblr, Path, Flickr, Instagram, YouTube, Vimeo, LinkedIn, Google+, my own self-hosted Wordpress blog and probably another half-dozen I’ve forgotten. Some of those have disappeared, some have faded to insignificance and some, notably Facebook and Twitter, are still forces to be reckoned with. But in the end, the only one I control is my own self-hosted blog.

In other words, don’t abandon your “owned” channels. I don’t think Facebook is going away anytime soon. Quite the opposite, in fact; I think Facebook is becoming the “shadow Internet.” But as a brand, you have no control over Facebook. Or Twitter. Or Ello. Keep building your email subscriber lists. Keep sending people to your website. Keep publishing content that will boost your search engine ratings. Don’t spend all your time and money investing in a channel that could change or disappear.

To learn more about social media marketing for SMB, visit our website, or download a free e-book.