We’re bombarded with advice on how to have a successful and effective social media strategy. But sometimes, it’s the simple common sense advice that really hits home.

The below infographic from PRMarketing.com outlines the five basic steps for social media success.

1. Be Active – Engage with your users and start the conversations.
2. Be Interesting – Says it all really!
3. Be Humble – Don’t copy other social media strategies, create your own based on basic concepts.
4. Be Unprofessional – Chat to your fans in a relaxed, friendly manner.
5. Be Honest – Admit it when you make a mistake

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When in the market for a new car, electrical item, holiday or a meal out, how often do you turn to the internet for advice? With social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, and search engines like Google, a recommendation, review or product comparison is just a type and a click away.

The infographic above is an interesting one for demonstrating the influence the internet now has on our buying behaviours. The following points were particularly interesting:

• 20% of social consumers use Facebook to research products at least once a week.
• Facebook, YouTube and Review Sites have the most influence on shoppers. Interestingly, Twitter, Blog Posts and Facebook Comments feature in the bottom five influences. Considering how often many of us use Twitter to crowdsource, and blog posts to get an honest review of products, I’m surprised to see these rank lower than online ads and news articles.
• After online interaction, 31% of people are promoted to purchase, 20% are prompted to recommend but 26% take no action.

Overall, the general message of this infographic is that a successful online marketing strategy can’t just be about Facebook and Twitter. While these ‘owned’ methods help, search (Google etc.) and earned methods (ratings and review sites and blog posts etc.) are just as important.

It has become something of a celebrity trend to bash Twitter (and usually celebrities that don’t use the social network). This time, it’s actor and director Ralph Fiennes, who blames Twitter for the downfall of the English language.

He said “We’re in a world of truncated sentences, soundbites and Twitter.”

”[Language] is being eroded — it’s changing. Our expressiveness and our ease with some words is being diluted so that the sentence with more than one clause is a problem for us, and the word of more than two syllables is a problem for us.”

“I hear it, too, from people at drama schools, who say the younger intake find the density of a Shakespeare text a challenge in a way that, perhaps, [students] a few generations ago maybe wouldn’t have.”

Now, I’m not sure who Ralph has viewed on Twitter (if anyone has at all), but it is full of editors, journalists, PRs, bloggers and entrepreneurs. People who have a fairly good, if not fanatical, grasp of the English language. The 140 character limit might pose a slight problem, but most of us manage to struggle on without resorting to text language.

I’d agree that social media is making text language more widespread, or at least more visible. The ease of sending a quick tweet can mean we suffer from the odd spelling mistake or missing apostrophe. Issues with language are possibly more rife on Facebook. Particularly with teenagers, but that’s what teenagers do.

What do you think? Is Twitter the reason the English language is on the demise?

Posting to Facebook isn’t just about posting the right content for your customers and fans. The time you post it is equally important. For example, post at 7am and you’re unlikely to get as many views as a post that goes up at 9am or lunchtime, purely because fewer people will be awake to view it.

Jeff Widman from PageLever recently wrote a piece for Mashable about how often you should post on Facebook, and when to post. Jeff actually places the emphasis on how long your post stays in a news feed. Like many Facebook fanatics, he advises against posting so much that your posts turn up several times in one news feed, as fans will turn off and unlike your page. But posting too little means you risk being missed by fans. The new Facebook pages mean that if fans aren’t interacting with your page, they’ll see your updates less often, so the quality of your content is a consideration too.

But trying to work out how often you should post based on news feed speed creates a problem: it’s pretty much guess-work. You can work out an average, but it really does depend on how many pages and people each fan already follows.

The key to finding out what time is best for your page is to pay attention to your page stats. Try posting at different times throughout each day. Then, check out the impressions and feedback for each post (you’ll find this data just above the like and comment buttons.) You’re aiming to get as many impressions and feedback activities (shares, likes and comments) as possible.

Additionally, you need to monitor the speed of impressions, and when the increase in impressions starts to slow down. If, for example, impressions steadily increase for 24 hours then stop, you know that most posts last a day in the average news feed. Therefore, posting daily is enough for your fans.

Do you have a specific method when it comes to posting on Facebook?