Having focus is very important to a successful social media campaign. There is a lot of advice floating around and its easy to take the wrong advice and up wasting a lot of time, and possibly money. Social media is not a shortcut to success like most people want it be, its a marketing tools that requires attention and a plan. Here are seven tips to keep your social media strategy focused:

1. What Are Your Assets - Before you get started know that this type of marketing requires time, knowledge, and ability to really work. It’s not a one-time bang it out deal that you can zip through. If these aspects are a problem you can always go the route of a consultant. Obviously this most likely won’t be free but you need a constant presence in social media to survive and that’s the main plus when using a consultant.

2. Define You Audience - Know what demographic you want to hit before you try to hit. Creating a presence in your niche is more important than marketing to everyone you can. Always put your target demographic first, then worry about the stragglers. There’s no point in wasting your time and energy in an audience that will never convert to business. Most services have search functions, use them! It’s incredibly easy to penetrate your niche with all of the advanced search features you can find around the web.

3. Target Niche Specific Social Media Sites - Major social media sites can bring a lot of visitors. I would say that a good starting point would be 2-3 niche networks, and all the big players like Digg, StumbleUpon, Twitter, etc. Keep in mind that you want to constructively build profiles on these networks. You can branch out to the thousands of social networks but if you only have a picture and a link in your profile you won’t get far. If you like a girl and you never call her what do you expect to happen? See where the focus comes into play? Focus on your key networks and develop a stronger following.

4. You Got Your Niche, Now Target Your Content - Quality will always pay off in the end. Social media users are not looking for content that’s forced on them but instead something they can use, or content that’s easily shared. Even if you have to pay someone to develop content or widgets for you, its worth it. The amount of traffic and buzz that a major response in social media brings is massive. Create your content geared specifically to your audience and try not to stray to far from your niche. People are there for information on your niche, so give it to them.

5. Do You Have A Conversion Plan - Once you get to the point of masses of traffic, you need to start leveraging it. This all depends on your goals but the first and most basic is converting new users to RSS subscribers. Chances are you have some sort of RSS going for your content so make sure to push it on all of your new visitors. Also think about how you can convert large amounts of traffic into product sales, affiliate sales, leads, and content shares to develop backlinks. The possibilities for conversions is endless, once you have an audience you will learn how to shape and mold content that can bring desired results.

6. Stay Hyped - Once you start to achive your sucess and become a part of the community, you have to work extra hard. Stopping after getting a little success is putting water on the fire. Visit your targeted sites daily and stay active. Vote for others, submit content, add friends, leave comments, etc. When people notice you are submitting and voting for only your content, they have an obvious tendency to dislike you. Use your dam noggin, social media users are another bread and most of them are smart enough to tell a spammer from a member of the community. Keep pushing out content and making yourself known.

7. Learn, Rinse, Repeat - After you have substantial information you can start to evaluate what’s working and what isn’t. Get rid of time wasters and try to put a value on each traffic source. Its much easier to see whats working when you have a criteria. This is why it’s important to have a structured goal. Continue to do what works and tweak your proccess for effciantacy. The nice thing about social media is that as your audience grows, the workload becomes much easier. Your following will do much of your marketing and promotion for you through blog posts and other sharing outlets if you can develop the right content for the job. Also remember to keep tabs on what your community is saying about you. Take advice from your readers, and learn to deal with haters because they are an inevitable waste product of success. No matter how well you do and how much people like you, there are always a handful of unhappy people that envy you. I personally like to take it as a compliment when people go out of their way to try and undermine me. Remember: If they’re hatin’, your doin something right.

Now that you can see how focusing in instead of shooting blind can mean the difference between a failed social media campaign and a successful one. Its about staying in it and developing experience. I have had my share of failures but I have learned more from those than anything else. Create a dynamite plan to outline your site, and you can take a lot of work out of being successful.