Creating a Social Media "Strategy"

I have a love/hate relationship with Facebook.  Every now and again, I go on these Facebook blasts where I check statuses and comment on one or two things, and then I fall off the Facebook map again, content to live in Twitter for a few weeks at a time.  But sometimes, even in the Twitterverse, I catch myself doing (or not doing) things that I should if I were truly "building a platform" or "creating a social media strategy."  Things like failing to retweet, or only providing links in tweets and little content, etc.  And I limit the folks that I follow, which limits my feeds but at the same time constricts my growth and reach.  So, I started thinking about how to truly develop a social media "strategy" if you will, and then grow that over time.  We'll check back in periodically and see if I'm even following any of this, but it's worth documenting in case others want to try the same experiment.  Here's my thoughts:

• Decide on your avenues -  I'm already on Facebook and Twitter, so that's really the starting point for me.  And I read a few blogs and obviously write a few as well.  So, all in all, I have several directions and sites that I can leverage as part of a strategy.  If you're exclusively on one or two sites, you might think about branching out, but only after figuring out what other social network you would be interested in, and how you might want to use them.  Don't overextend, or you might have a difficult time keeping up with any of it.
• Set limits - I cannot and will not spend hours a day wasting away on Twitter or Facebook (though I probably COULD spend a ton of time on Twitter just reading crap), so any "strategy" I define has to be limited to what I could do in about fifteen minutes a day or via my phone in the drive through line at Whataburger or Chik-Fil-A.
• Don't be selfish - This is a hard one to learn for many people (myself included), but a key part of the strategy has to be promoting OTHER PEOPLE.  It is called SOCIAL networking, after all.  So, I think a metric to look at is how many things you are doing to promote yourself versus promoting other people.  The more times you retweet others, the more likely others are to read (and perhaps retweet) your links.  Scratch my back and I'll scratch yours, etc.  Leave more comments on other people's blogs than you do posts on your own.  Just make sure you still have posts of your own for when people follow back to your blog to see what content is there.
• Track your progress - OK, so you don't have to have a "checklist" of sorts, but it might help to understand at first how frequently you want to do certain social network behaviors and how frequently you are engaging in those behaviors.  Identify which things you want to focus on and try to do those a few times a week.  If it's easy to do, then up your numbers (if you want to do them even more).
• Get a tool - I have been using HootSuite, but if you're going to do any sort of scheduling of posts, you need a way to do that.  There are lots of free tools out there.

So those are my thoughts, how about you?