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For internet marketers, nothing compares in value to the house list. It’s gold. You know that you can blast an e-mail and count on a certain conversion rate, yielding a comfortable predictability to your revenue stream. Yet, there are limits to e-mail marketing. After a while, you have to limit your campaigns, for fear of winding up in a spam folder or seeing the unsubscribes tick up. You’re ability to interact with your most likely buyers, therefore, is inherently constrained. Social media platforms can cut the ties that bind, however, and bring new flexibility to your internet marketing efforts.

Doubtless, direct pitches to your fan base will eventually meet with the same malaise triggered by e-mail saturation. So, keep your blasts to a minimum. Instead, use other methods to attract the attention of your fans or followers — which is effectively your social media “house list” — and you can stimulate buying activity much more often.

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The purpose of a corporate blog or other social media presence isn’t merely to add to the endless electrons that are produced every day. And, it isn’t merely to provide a free service to the world. You’re looking to advance your business. While this may entail providing a free service consisting of informative and useful content, the net result has to be a lead stream for you to exploit. To turn your social media communities and traffic into business opportunities, you need hooks.

It’s easy to go overboard. In pursuit of leads, many companies tend to use their social media environments as advertisements, promoting at the expense of informing. Do this, and you run this risk of losing your audience — as well as your investment in the social media marketing initiative. When you create content and interact with your community, play it straight: deliver information that your readers can use — but don’t be afraid to make it easy for them to enter the sales cycle. This is where your “hooks” become useful.

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Does having a Facebook fan page, a LinkedIn group and a blog mean you have to content — regularly — for three different platforms? It’s a scary thought, probably enough to turn even the most zealous social media advocate away from the space. Well, here’s the good news: write content correctly, and you can carve it up for use across your entire integrated social media environment. There is no bad news.

Start with the blog post — it’s going to be your anchor. The material you publish on your blog will tend to be longer and more complex than what you put on Facebook, LinkedIn or certainly Twitter. Everything else you write and post should be pulled from this source. Not only do you only write once, with the exception of small modifications, but you ensure consistency across your entire social media environment.

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Facebook has attained incredible reach, and Twitter’s rise has been nothing short of meteoric. LinkedIn has demonstrated strong and steady growth. But, the history of the social media space is littered with the corpses of former flavors of the month, and the likes of MySpace and Friendster represent sunk costs for companies that believed these environments were around for the long haul. Choosing right platform, it would seem, is crucial.

To think that, however, would be to miss the point entirely.

Instead of working diligently to select the most appropriate social media platform, it’s better to realize that you’ll assume a certain amount of obsolescence risk with any platform you choose. Under these conditions, protecting your social media marketing investment is actually much easier than you’d expect. All you need to do is ensure that your content is easily portable.

Specific social media tools may come in and out of fashion, but well-planned content will stick around for a while.

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What social media marketing metrics are you using?

The latest research from MarketingSherpa indicates that businesses using social media to promote their products and services — and fill their lead streams — are employing a variety of measures to gauge the effectiveness of their initiatives. Of course, the metrics you’d expect have been most widely adopted, but there are some important stats being watched by a small group of companies that signal where social media marketing is headed.

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