1. Always engage, acknowledge, and appreciate your followers. If someone tweets about you, send a thank you. If someone posts something positive about you, acknowledge them. A business is nothing without the support of its followers, so, always do your best to ensure your followers are recognized and appreciated.

2. You should spend around an hour a day on social media marketing for your business, once your business is up and running (much more when you are starting off). Look at social media like networking. You will not be able to speak to all of your followers, every day, but, connect with a few people a day and build relationships, and, definitely respond to those who directly address you.

3. With the ever increasing number of businesses and people using social media, the consensus is that 2012 may be a year of oversaturation. Businesses will require a more focused effort to make fewer, more relevant posts, that engage their followers, or, be left behind as noise.

4. Ensure that you are using social bookmarking sites to bookmark your blog posts. Doing this on the major social bookmarking sites, such as del.icio.us, Digg, and Reddit, to name a few, will create links back to your site and tags relating to your content, helping with SEO.

5. Facebook user engagement for brands peaks at three points each day: 7am EST, 5pm EST, and 11pm EST. In essence, before people go to work, after they get off work, and just before bed. If you post during the work day, there’s a good chance you’re missing out on prime user engagement.