Social media marketing strategies can be your savior if you have them or an obstacle if you’ve been relying on nothing but general intuition or outdated practices.

If you’ve been putting off optimizing your social media marketing strategies or even putting together a social media marketing campaign, there’s nothing like using the New Year to provide some structure to your self-improvement. Hopefully this will be more of a lasting plan than most of our “lose 30 pounds” resolutions. Either way, take these social media marketing strategies to heart this year to ensure your marketing success.

1. Get Profiles Set Up for ALL Major Outlets

You read right. EVERY SINGLE MAJOR SOCIAL MEDIA OUTLET. It seems tedious, I know, and that’s because it is.

If you’re one of those lucky ones with a hired team of social media pros (or even just one person) as a part of your marketing arsenal, this shouldn’t take long. With continued, uninterrupted effort this can be a matter of a few hours, as it may also involve doing a bit of research into your competitors to see if they’re active anywhere you’re not.

Get going with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ for starters. From there, get a social blog set up with your site page. Pinterest can come next, alongside YouTube, any industry-specific sites, and image hosting like Photobucket. Don’t forget about getting your business listed on review sites, either.

2. COMPLETE All Your Profiles

Even more tedious than setting all these up is completing them. You’ve been putting it off, but now’s the time to do it.

Again, if you have someone in charge of this job or can devote continuous time, it’s not so bad. Set up a spreadsheet with all the info you need and then literally just copy/paste into the required fields. The dual benefit is maintaining consistency on all your profiles.

3. Get Your Blog Rolling

Even if you’re just posting 100 words or hiring out someone to spin you some articles for the time being, get something going on your site’s blog that people can actually see. Make sure comments are open so you can promote conversation and make this media marketing technique social.

4. Head to Analytics to Assess Traffic

This one isn’t just about social media, but it should definitely incorporate it.

Either get a professional to take a look at your site’s Analytics or do it yourself if you know what you’re looking at, and check which of your pages aren’t getting the return visitors or conversions you’re looking for. Make a report of these site pages and their numbers for the days you study them, and then set goals. From there, use your completed social media marketing campaigns to target those pages.

5. Head to Analytics to Assess Sources

This one should be very telling for the success of your social media marketing strategies.

Look at the traffic sources for all of your pages and see where your social media outlets are playing in. If one of them is doing exceedingly well, analyze why it is, then use that for your other social media marketing strategies. For the ones not performing well, start paying more attention to them and try to provide more links in better ways (see “Social Media Marketing: Why You’re Failing at It (Pt. 3)” for tips on linking better).