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If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a million times: Social media is a waste of time. There’s no way to measure your results. Plus, it’s just a fad. This is the rallying cry of social media skeptics in the business community. And you know what? I agree with them…to an extent.

Let me explain.

Social media is a waste of time if you blindly jump into it without knowing what you’re doing. And you can’t measure results if you don’t create a strategy with goals for tracking your progress. And because you’re doing it all wrong, you will get tired of it, making it a passing fad for you.

So, this all leads to the question: How do you do social media right? It all starts with building a social media plan with goals and a strategy for reaching them.

Step #1—Set your goals

You know why most businesses give up on social media? Because they don’t really know what they want out of it. And since they don’t know what they want to achieve, their social media campaign isn’t moving toward anything.

Setting goals is essential to being successful with social media. Realistic social media goals include:

• Improving customer service

• Building brand awareness

• Increasing website traffic

• Creating more referrals for your business

• Earning more backlinks

• Getting to know your target audience better

• Soliciting new ideas from your target audience

You could add a dozen more items to this list, but the point is to set a goal before you do anything else.

Step #2—Do some research

Before you start Tweeting away, hold your horses for a minute. The next thing you need to do is some research to figure out which social media outlets will be most effective for reaching your goals. This means you need to determine which social networks your target audience uses, how other companies have used social media successfully, which social networks are a waste of time for your niche, how long it will take to start seeing results, and how you’re going to track your progress.

You should also spend time gathering as much information as you can about how to leverage social media for business success. Learn about social media etiquette, mistakes to avoid, and the ins and outs of the various social networks you plan to use.

Step #3—Create an action plan

All right: You have your goals, and you’ve done your research. It’s time to draft a plan for making those goals a reality.

• Schedule time for social media—This haphazard approach of using social media for your business will never cut it. You can’t send a few Tweets here, forget about it for a week, log on and send out some more Tweets, write a blog post, disappear for another week, and repeat. Like anything else in your business, you need to schedule time each day for putting your social media campaign to work. Not only will scheduling time make sure you’re consistently using social media, but it will also reduce the amount of time you waste as you’ll stay focused on the task knowing you have just a certain amount of time allotted for it.

• Build your network—It’s called “social media” for a reason. You need to be social, and you need to build relationships. A powerful network is crucial to achieving your social media goals. For example, if your goal is to solicit feedback from your target audience, they’re much likelier to provide this feedback if you have a relationship with them and they know who you are.

• Stay consistent—Using social media isn’t going to propel your business to the next level overnight. Social media success requires a long-term commitment to cultivating relationships and gathering the right information. Don’t get frustrated if no one seems to care about you after the first week or 2; it takes time.

• Track your progress—This is the most important part of your social media plan. Depending on what your goals are, you need to find a way to track them. For example, if your goal is to build more inbound links to your website, you need to constantly track how many links are pointing at your website from the time you started your social media campaign until now. If after a few months you see no increase in your backlinks, you need to move onto the next step:

• Adjust plan as necessary—Are you not progressing toward your goals the way you hoped you would? That’s okay. Instead of giving up, take a step back and figure out what adjustments you can make to kick start your progress.

Are you using social media for your business? What are your keys to social media success?

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