The following list of social media best practices is culled from various lists around the Web (and linked to accordingly) as well as some of my own thoughts on the topic.

• Social media is not a strategy. How does social media fit within your overall communications strategy? Twitter is not a strategy. Facebook is not a strategy. These are tools and venues. Identify the audiences you want to reach, decide what you want to accomplish, research where your audience(s) are (or are not) participating in social media, how they behave there, what their media diet is, what technology they use and how they use it.
• Commit. Devote enough time and resources to accomplish your goals.
• Transparency. Honesty. Authenticity. Above all, do not deceive! People will find out and you will pay for it. Be up front about who you are and what you want.
• Let go. Understand that you do not control the message. You never have. The only thing that has changed is that you can now hear that you don’t control the message.
• Success. What does it look like? How will you know if you’ve accomplished your goals? Define success, then…
• Measure. Determine how you can measure degrees of success so you can gage ...