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As we begin to immerse all of our clients in social media, we keep hearing the same types of questions:

What will it do for me and my company?

How do I start?

Why should I?

Although we always advise our clients to take a look at who they are trying to target with social media efforts, it is vital to be engaged online in some way.  Setting up accounts and interacting in a basic way on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn is a great way to dip your toe in the water before jumping head first.

Even if you don’t know where to start, monitoring the chatter is a good way to warm up to social media.  The key here is listening.  It is important to know what people are saying about your brand and embrace your target market’s opinion.

I took a short webinar on Hubspot by Rick Burnes this morning that taught social media “newbies” how to monitor the Web in only ten minutes a day. I took this as an opportunity to take a step back and learn things from a beginner’s perspective so that we can explain things more clearly (we so often forget that some clients don’t even know what a re-tweet is). Below are the steps of engagement:

Initial Setup:

1. Create Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts.
2. Set up a Google Alert on your brand or product name and other words associated with your organization.
3. Subscribe to Google Reader to have everything feed into your RSS.
4. Link all of your accounts into Google Reader.

Daily Monitoring:

1. Read through your Google Reader subscriptions daily to see what people are saying. (7 minutes)
2. Log into Facebook and check discussions and posts to your wall. (3 minutes)

It’s truly that simple.

Remember: volume is not what converts to a return in social media, listening and responding is.