[Posted by Alexis Karlin
Digital Marketing Specialist, Neolane, Inc.]

Today and tomorrow I’ll be attending MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Forum in Austin, Texas. As the conference progresses, I will be live blogging from a variety of sessions. This post is from the “New To You: Social Media Best Practices to Heat up Your Marketing” session hosted by Jeffrey Cohen, Social Media Marketing Manager, Howard, Merrell and Partners and Sharon Mostyn, Assistant Vice President, Ecommerce, 1st Mariner Bank.

Although this session is for beginners using Social Media, I really wanted to attend because one of my favorite bloggers Jeffrey L. Cohen was speaking, so I knew it would be good. And it was, I learned a lot of getting back to basics that I find everyone tends to forget when they got too deep into social media and their day jobs.

Here is a list of the top 15 tips I learned from this session that experienced social users/practitioners need to remember.

1. Have a Goal
2. Listen to find out where your audience is
3. Make your message clear, stay away from industry jargon
4. Make your site professional and organized for the customer
5. Blog on your own domain
6. Blog once a week or set up an editorial calendar so you are blogging on a consistent basis
7. Answer and ask questions on every medium that is relevant to you and your business
8. Buy a flip cam, shoot videos, and use those as blog posts
9. RT on Twitter, this helps you get recognized
10. Participate in the twitter eco-system and grow your followers
11. Make sure you have a team in place to handle customer service
12. Chat is a great way to find people who will allow you to have sub conversations on Twitter
13. Use LinkedIn Groups for connecting and generating conversation
14. Go through your analytics at the end of the month to see what you are doing right and what you are doing wrong
15. Be consistent, do it all the time, do it often, or do it never