Social media is already a part of everyone’s daily existence, but there is a difference between using it to keep current by sending your friends photos and tweets and using it to promote your startup. There are good uses of social media and bad ones, and the trick is learning to distinguish between the two so you don’t find yourself trending for the wrong reasons. The best social media campaigns go viral because they’re thought-provoking or fun to watch, and if you can create something that generates shares and retweets while giving a shout-out to your business, you’ve cracked the social media code.

Not everything you put out to your friends and followers related to your startup has to be earth shattering, but it needs to matter. It needs to make someone take notice. That doesn’t mean smothering people with an endless stream of posts on your every thought and whim. Save that for your personal feed. Limit posts about your business to one good captioned photo on Instagram or Facebook per day. Same goes for Twitter and Snapchat. Save multiple postings for something special: the ramp-up to the launch of your new song on iTunes, the countdown to your product’s availability on store shelves or at a holiday boutique, the few days before your play is set to open. The countdown approach builds excitement, but you must use it sparingly.

People have a much greater tolerance for multiple postings if you include a contest or giveaway. It gives them an incentive to check back to see if they’re one of the lucky winners of your soon-to-launch knitted skullcap with built-in headphones.

SIMPLIFY AND STREAMLINE YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA EFFORTS. You can populate your Facebook page with photos at the same time you’re putting them on Instagram with one click and reach two potentially different audiences who only look at one or the other.

At its most basic, social media is a great, immediate way for you to crowdsource ideas and see what people think as well as share photos and news about what you’re doing. It will help you stay current on trends and get almost instant feedback from fans and followers. Shares and likes will quickly give you great information about what you’re doing right and what’s catching the eye of customers you want to target. You can communicate about a new stationery design or an upcoming trunk show in a quick tweet, e-mail, or post, rather than having to rely on a traditional snail mailer that takes over a day to arrive. Plus it’s free.

Keep an ear out for the next big thing. One day it’s Instagram, the next day it’s Snapchat. That doesn’t mean you have to scurry around posting things everywhere in sight and hoping for popularity. On the contrary, pay attention and figure out where you’ll get the right amount of attention for your business. Staying on the cutting edge often means more listening than doing.

Start by using the same social media sites you use to keep in touch with friends. Be assertive. Design a page with your new name and roll out your logo. You never know who might see a blast from you at just the right time to make a sale.

The best thing you can do is post something that gets reposted. Sometimes it’s hard to dream up what that will be. If everyone knew how to go viral, everyone would. But think about the kinds of things you repost. Are they funny stories? Impromptu video clips? You know your friends and you know what they like. Even just saying “Forward this to your friends to help me launch my business” is a good way to start your word-of-mouth campaign.

Alex Douwes and Nellie Morris of Purpose Generation learned to be flexible about how they used social media.

NELLIE AND ALEX

When we started, we wore formal attire and used corporate lingo in the hopes it would make us more credible in the eyes of our clients. But now that we’ve built a track record, we feel more comfortable showing off our personalities; in fact, we realized that our clients expect us to have more edge—that’s what they hire us for, after all.

One challenge we face is that we’re trying to cater to two very different audiences on social media: on the one hand, we have our clients, which are large corporates, and on the other hand we want to speak to millennials and potential tribe members. We have to find a happy medium and be respectful of the clients we represent, but we also understand that the purpose of social media is to show a more relatable side of yourself to the outside world by providing a window into your personal opinions and adventures. Every time we post pictures of ourselves traveling or at events, our engagement doubles or triples, so we’re trying to get more comfortable sharing our personal stories on this platform.

DANGER AHEAD!

Of course, you have to be careful. Make sure what you put out into the world is really the right thing to be sharing. Never share intimate information or images. Do not provide your home address or phone number. Keep it professional.

Chelsea Siler, Canadian Broadcasting Company/Radio Canada, gives the long-term perspective.

CHELSEA

If this tweet was on a billboard on the busiest highway with your face on it, would you be okay with it? I know anyone who is hiring me is going to go to my Instagram account, my Twitter account. I believe not tweeting that thing that is a little controversial is not going to change anything, but tweeting it could ruin everything. When you’re in school, you’re learning and developing and you’re not thinking about when you’re 33 and going to apply for that VP job. You’re thinking about how you’ve had a really hard week of finals and you want to celebrate.

You have to understand how long things last online. So if you’re going to put your name on something, it’s going to last forever. Pictures still live forever. I don’t like telling people to avoid social media because that’s where communities live. But if you want to be a successful person in business and in life, there needs to be a filter in how you live online.

The Fe (Iron) Maidens, a high school robotics team, are mindful of the negative aspects of putting yourself out there on social media.

CHARLOTTE, TEAM CAPTAIN

Our team is incredibly active on all forms of social media, including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. We use it to interact with other FIRST (“for recognitions of science and technology”) teams; to keep our sponsor, members, and alumnae informed of our activities; and to help spread our message on women in STEM. As useful as social media can be, it can also be a very negative place. People can be much nastier online than they ever would be in person. And anything you put on the web will be there forever.

TMI AND OVERSHARING

SOCIAL MEDIA DOS AND DON’TS

DO LET FRIENDS, LIKERS, CIRCLES KNOW ABOUT SOMETHING NEW—a new jewelry design, a new place to buy your handbags, a website makeover. New things lead to new sales.

DON’T TELL PEOPLE EVERY TIME YOU CHANGE YOUR SHIRT or post what you had for breakfast. This works for some social media celebrities, but it’s hard to get right, and if you annoy your followers, they may stop paying attention.

DO ANNOUNCE WHEN SOMETHING GREAT HAPPENS—you reached a milestone, sold your first 100,000 banana bread loaves, got your mustard on the shelves at Whole Foods. Let your customers, friends, and supporters share your success.

DON’T MAKE IT SOUND LIKE YOU’RE BRAGGING. Be gracious about your success. You’re honored to have been chosen. You’re fortunate to have this new opportunity. Humility is key.

DO INCLUDE PICTURES—use Instagram and Pinterest so you can show, not tell, what you’re doing. Re-pins can do wonders for new sales.

LET SOCIAL MEDIA DO YOUR RESEARCH

Keep an eye and an ear out to what people are talking about, posting, “liking,” and reposting. Use this to help mold your business ideas.

MAKE IT FUN. You can design a little chart or keep a running tally of how many friends have re-pinned a photo on Pinterest or reposted a video from Upworthy. Then do some thinking. See if you can figure out the magic ingredient that made it worthy of sending onward. Was it silly? Was it a parody of a hit song? Was it just a really great use of bananas and chocolate chips to make Halloween ghosts?

Then see if you can craft something yourself according to those conventions. Make your own social media campaign using clever, gorgeous photos or funny, catchy singing. Get out your cell phone and make a video about your business. Make it entertaining and friends will forward it on.

RESEARCH YOUR CUSTOMERS BY LOOKING AT REVIEWS online. Read reviews at sites like Yelp, Citysearch, and Amazon, places where users tell it exactly like they mean it. If a new gelato shop is churning out boring flavors, users are going to Yelp about it. If a rival has come up with the most swoon-worthy combination of chocolate and salted caramel ice cream, fans will be talking it up. Use that information to get clues about what people like, what they hate, and what they consider important. You’ll find out tiny details you’d never dream up in a million years just by looking at a stack of reviews. Then use them to improve your business.

ASK FOR FEEDBACK DIRECTLY. Trying to decide whether your new logo is lost in the’90s? Ask your friends and followers. Looking for ideas for a great summer reading book? Just ask which ones everyone loves. Then use the information to make smart decisions about what to do. Direct research gives you real information, with the power to make you better in business.

IF IT’S NEWS, GET THE WORD OUT FAST

LET PEOPLE KNOW ABOUT SOMETHING NEW—a new clothing design, a new column on your blog, a buy-10-get-1 discount—via whatever social media your friends and customers are using to keep up with you. The immediacy of social media allows you to decide on the spur of the moment to have a fire sale on all of last year’s designs. And if you let people know via social media, they can show up to your sale—today. You can find out that the local newspaper reviewed your new raspberry-vanilla cheesecake and let people know where to find it before the review has left the newsstands or migrated to the archives of the paper’s website. Take advantage of social media’s instancy.

Like anything whose upside is instant, immediate, and fast, there are pitfalls. Make sure you double- and triple-check what you’re about to blast or tweet or send, before it goes out into the world forevermore. You can’t un-ring that social network bell. Re-read before you send.

Remember to be consistent. If you commit to blogging or tweeting twice a day, don’t quit. People get used to seeing regular posts and will begin to look for them. But don’t bore them. Always have something new to share, even if it’s just a new graphic or a current twist.

Chental-Song Bembry has sold more than 3,000 copies of The Honey Bunch Kids books and is working on a graphic novel and animated TV show based on her characters. She’s a big believer in using social media to get the word out.

CHENTAL-SONG

I’m on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Using social media is all about nonstop promotion of your product. If you constantly put it out, eventually people will start to see it and you’ll build a following.

I have used Google ads in the past, but I’m taking a break from paying for advertising right now, and I’m just promoting it myself and using a lot of hashtags on Instagram to help get the word out, because if people look at #art, they can see the pictures. You can’t stop, because eventually people find you.

KEEP IT IN PERSPECTIVE

Why do we always warn you about keeping perspective, not letting things spiral out of control? Because it’s human nature to keep plugging away at things we care about, sometimes to the exclusion of all else. Social media can be especially seductive and before you know it, you’ve become one with your screen.

We’ve all seen them: the irritating people who can’t put down their phones while having a conversation with you. They may be sitting across from you at a restaurant, but their eyes are on their phones and their thumbs are madly at work, typing, scrolling, and keeping up with everything but what you’re saying. Annoying, right?

You can stay on top of social media and use it to benefit your business without driving everyone around you mad. When you have your own business, there are two traps people generally fall into: having so much fun procrastinating and doing anything and everything to avoid actually working that nothing ever happens; or more commonly, working so hard around the clock that you forget there’s such a thing as a workday. Your entire life becomes about work. But you need to keep everything in perspective.

Yes, you must work hard, and when you’ve started your own company, you are the one doing most of the work. But that doesn’t mean you should alienate your family and friends because you’re so caught up in growing your business that you are impossible to talk to. Put down the phone, close the laptop, shut off the e-reader, and have experiences. Be with people and talk to them without letting technology get in the way. It will be there for you later.

The beauty of technology is that it isn’t constrained by time zones and waking hours. You can send off missives in the middle of the night if you feel like it. But the benefit of unplugging and living in the moment is that life is happening around you. You’ll be privy to conversations and the hum of life, which is the very source of creativity a person needs when starting something new. You can’t know what the world wants if you’re blocking out the world looking at your phone. Put it down and just absorb the world around you. You’ll be glad you did.

Gabrielle Jordan, who started Jewelz of Jordan when she was just 9 years old, has a slightly different take on social media in the context of the real world.

GABRIELLE

Social media is huge, especially nowadays. I grew up in a tech world, and even though it was before Instagram and Twitter, it was always around. I am not the best at social media personally, but I’ve been learning and working on it. It’s so huge in business now, not just to reach youth, but to reach people on a large scale. You can network and brand and run a business on a laptop on your bed. It’s making sure you post enough so people are able to see you but don’t get annoyed by you, making sure every hashtag is designed to reach the right people to sell to, or the right people to hire you to speak. It’s second only to being out in the real world. You don’t have to stick with your state or your country—you can reach people throughout the entire world.

As young entrepreneurs, one of the things we have to balance is making sure we post as a professional but don’t look too professional. Don’t grow up too fast. Make sure to throw a dash of personal in there. I’m making sure I’m showing people I’m a young entrepreneur.

AGGREGATE!

TRY TO BE AS EFFICIENT AS POSSIBLE when using social media. Use programs like Postling, Spindex, Hootsuite, or Google Buzz, which can organize your social media into one location. Postling allows you to see where you’re posting information and how it’s being viewed. Hootsuite lets you set it up so you can decide where information should be shared and when. Google Buzz puts all the blog posts you like to read in one place so you don’t have to click all over the web to find the blogs you follow.

THERE ARE ALSO APPS AND WEBSITES that help you consolidate RSS (Rich Site Summary) feeds into one place, run searches across multiple sites, and combine friends. Social networking and its aggregating services are changing by the minute, so it’s nearly impossible to write something here that will be accurate six months from now. For your purposes as a new entrepreneur, just keep in mind that aggregators are out there and they can help you avoid having to search multiple places for what you want or can help you combine your feeds into one place. When that becomes useful for your project, you’ll have plenty of help in getting organized.