Social media marketing is about using the social web to find out more about your customers, potential customers and other stakeholders, and ultimately to join in the conversation with them wherever they are online.

Your customers will be having conversations about your brand and products / services with or without you. Starting to listen to what they have to say is the first step in social media marketing.

Using free, open source tools such as Google Alerts is ideal to get an email alert on keywords associated with your products and services. This will give you an insight into what is being discussed. Then start looking at where the main conversations are: they may be on specific blogs, Twitter, forums, YouTube or other social media and networking sites.

Once you know where the conversations are, you can start defining and refining your strategy. Most social media marketing strategies' main goal is to drive traffic into a website for a specific purpose. Social media marketing is about raising awareness of your brand or for a specific campaign. In the longer term the aim is to increase sales and new business leads or to build an audience.