Balance Sharing vs. Selling
Be mindful of the ratio between sharing and selling. Most folk are on social media platforms to be informed, entertained and educated-- they aren't there to buy. Selling is an important part of the bottom line, but it needs to be done with integrity, intelligence and ingenuity-- and if you drive away all your social connections, you'll have nobody to sell to.
Balance Connecting vs. Canvassing
Social media success is built on respectful engagement with your followers. Becoming a source of giving-based connecting makes for an effective social media strategy linchpin. If you’re going to canvas connections for support, make sure you’ve given plenty of useful nuggets to them first.
Balance Quality vs. Quantity
Traditional marketers remain obsessed with social media marketing as a numbers game. And for some products and services, successful social media engagement needs to be measured, at least in part, based on numerical analysis. But the Holy Grail for social media campaigns should, first and foremost, be about delivering quality content-- on social media, low quality and high quantity will get you flagged as spam and will damage your reputation.
Another way of phrasing the three balancing acts is this: design your 2013 plan around honest, transparent marketing. If you can execute on that, you’ll reap better financial, statistical and measurable returns on your time and money investments in social media during 2013.