I know. You’re wondering what is “productivize”? It is a totally made up word that we love around here in the Social Media Direct kitchen {read: office}. Productivize means to optimize productivity and profitability.

Essentially it sums up what we’d like social media to be for a small business owner. Productive. Profitable. Optimized.

With that out of the way, let’s see how to make this magic happen for YOUR business.

Here are 3 easy steps to productive, profitable and optimized social networking:

1. Find Your Focus

First things first, know why you’re on a particular network for it to be really profitable for your small business.If you need to productivize social media for small business, you need to have goals in place.

Whether it is selling more products or finding like-minded people to connect with, you need to have your focus in place.

You can have different goals from different networks, though or you may have just one goal for all three.

Bottomline: Have a goal in place for your social networking.

Some ideas for goals to have for social networking as a small business owner:

•  Connecting with prospective clients

• Establishing expertise

• Building brand visibility

• Lead generation

• Increase traffic to the website

• Do target market research

• Study competition

Also, remember to make your goals as specific as possible. For instance, if finding clients is a goal, quantify it. “I want to get 3 or 5 new clients via networking” or “ I want to work with XYZ as a client because they fit my ideal client profile”

Take Action: Write down your top 3 goals from your social media presence and share with me in the comments.

2. Make Every Tweet Count

Next, for social media for small business to be profitable AND productive, you must make your updates count. You must know whether people are reacting to your posts, tweets and pins. For this, use a tool that helps you measure your social influence.

While there are some robust paid pro tools that we use as part of our premium social media services, BackTweets, Buffer and Hootsuite offer some good free options to get started with as well.

Take Action: Choose a tool that will help you track your social media engagement.

Bonus Action Tip: Productivize social media further by using tools to also create updates and schedule them as well. We love Bufferapp, Pinstamatic and Pingraphy.

3. Optimize Social Media for Small Business with Authenticity

Finally, for your social networking efforts to be profitable and high on ROI, make sure that you are optimizing them with authenticity and personality. Let your “you-ness” shine through!

Relying on a bot to automate your updates or throw out random messages is easy but can impact your online reputation. Just as bad is hiring someone to just schedule your updates without understanding your brand’s voice, mission and vision. That is why when we partner with a client for our decadent social media media solutions, we spend time and research on understanding what their brand stands for and we want their community to know that we are partnering with them.

Here’s an example of how businesses and blog owners introduce us so that their community knows what’s up.

If your goal is to make your social media and networking a tool to grow your business, your community and your profits, you must be authentic. Period.