Social media is the most popular online activity. It’s even more popular than Web browsing, according to Jay Baer’s webinar, “7 Steps to Create Winning Social Media Strategies.” During the webinar, Baer shared useful information for companies who want to utilize social media for marketing purposes to help promote their brand and drive business to their website and location. Here are 7 tips from Baer to develop a winning social media campaign for your company.

• Recognize that social media impacts your business in ways that nothing else does. Anything that happens to your company (whether it’s good or bad) has the potential to become public through social media, whether your company wants it to or not. When it comes to social media, it’s smart to get suggestions from people in all departments of the company. Everyone in the organization should take some ownership and participate in social media in order to keep the company’s image positive.

• Listen to online conversations. People are already talking about your company online. Listen in to those conversations by exploring Facebook, Twitter, review sites and more to see what people think of you. Once you figure out what’s being said about you, you can use that information to guide your marketing strategy.

• Set your goals. What’s the point of your social media campaign? Do you want to educate others, raise brand awareness, generate sales or increase customer loyalty? Maybe you want to do all of those things. The best thing to do is pick one to concentrate on. Once you’ve mastered that, then you can take on another goal.

• Get people excited about your business. Think about who your customers are. How do they use social media? What is their age, gender and location? These are important things to think about when posting on social media networks. You want to make sure the information will appeal to them and encourage them to get excited about your company. The customer relationship looks like this: Unaware (have never heard of your company)à Aware (have heard of your company but never tried your service/product) à Trial (have tried your service/product once) à Repeat/Enthusiast (use your service/product frequently) à Advocate (encourage others to use your service/product). In order to move people from “unaware” to “advocate,” you need to get them pumped about your product or service.

• Figure out what your “one thing” is. Find one thing that’s special about your company and use your social media to highlight that unique thing. If every company in your industry has the same special offer as you, what makes yours so special? Example: Apple = Innovation, Disney = Magic, Volvo = Safety, You = To Be Determined. Until you find out what your “one thing” is, it’s going to be hard to get people psyched about your company.

• Find your “home base” social media network. Instead of trying to conquer all of the different social networks (which can be a daunting task,) find out which social media outlet is the best to connect with your customers. This will be your social media home base. Then use the other social media networks to drive people back to your home base. For example, Jay Baer said he uses his blog as his home base then uses Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc. to drive traffic to his blog.

• Track your progress. Use reporting to figure out which methods are working for you and which are not. Without reporting, you may be wasting time on some social media networks or marketing techniques that don’t work. Make sure to review and analyze your reports so you can see what’s working and what doesn’t. Then you can keep revising your marketing strategy in order to find success.