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If you?re unsure how to best leverage Facebook and Twitter, don?t stress about it. Remember: However social-media trends play out, consumers will always, always want three things when they shop online: lower prices, more selection and better service.

While it might sound like a great idea to add Facebook Connect integration and Facebook ?Like? buttons to your e-commerce site with the hopes of attracting viral traffic from Facebook, proceed with caution. When your customers click that they ?Like? a certain product on your site, Facebook records that data and then lets companies target those users with advertising. Essentially, you?re giving your competitors data they can use to target your customers on Facebook. Depending on what you sell and how competitive the market is, it might be worth the risk, but tell your employees to let you know if they notice that they are being targeted by ads from your competitors. If you see one of your competitors showing you an attractive offer, you?ll know why.

Studies show that Facebook users are more likely to engage with an offer presented on the site if they don?t have to leave the Facebook ecosystem to do so. Another best-practice we hear is that Facebook fan pages are most effective when the merchant starts conversations with its followers (e.g., by asking a question) instead of just ?pushing? offers out to its fans. If you want to have a best-in-class fan page, check out 3rd party products like Involver (BVP portfolio company).

a recent study by Nielsen showed that people now spend 22.7% of their online time on social networks, up from 15.8% just a year ago. Moreover, according to eMarketer, 41% of all U.S. Facebook members connect with fan pages to highlight their favorite brands.

there are a number of new vendors that are emerging that offer other, unique solutions to motivate users to share their purchases.

#10: Keep it social, but keep your data too

To best leverage your NPS, make it as easy as possible for your Promoters (those that rated your service a 9 or a 10) to promote you. One way is through loyalty or incentive programs.

identify your best customers. They are your most profitable customers, who come back to your site again and again. Work hard to keep them happy. You might try dubbing your most loyal customers VIPs, as Zappos does. This nomenclature may sound silly, but people are naturally proud of being loyal customers of services they like. Then make these customers realize you value them as evangelists or VIPs. Invite them to VIP-only events or sales, and send them special emails to get their feedback. This also serves to encourage their customer loyalty. But you can do more.

#9: Identify your best customers, encourage customer loyalty, and motivate the evangelicals

Amazon has maintained its innovative, startup culture partly by avoiding the temptation to build large teams to tackle big problems. Instead, the company typically takes a problem and divides it into bite-size pieces, assembling small teams to attack each part of the problem. The rule of thumb for the teams is that they should be ?no bigger than you can feed with two pizzas.? Most often, this means a team of three developers, a product manager, perhaps a shared designer resource and a manager.

Each workgroup in Amazon must build a ?fitness function?, a customized equation that incorporates the most important metrics for a particular group. When computed, the fitness function creates a single ?fitness number.? This is the number each group presents to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. And if this all-important number isn?t going ?up and to the right? consistently, the group is in trouble. Each group?s fitness function has to be approved by Bezos, and sometimes it takes months (if not years) for groups to arrive at the right function.

Obsession with page-load times. It?s easy to be tempted to add JavaScript tags from different vendors to your Web pages to soup up the functionality on your site. But beware: These tags can slow down performance.

Onsite advertising represents a great opportunity to leverage manufacturer trade budgets to generate additional revenues for your onsite clicks. While manufacturers usually resist lowering their wholesale prices, they are often willing to provide retailers with kick-backs and promotional budgets, which are equally powerful profit contributors. Companies like Hooklogic and Intent Media hope to be the BazaarVoice of onsite advertising and are already gaining traction with some of the biggest names in e-commerce.

companies like BazaarVoice and PowerReviews help online retailers launch product-review functionality with minimal effort. It?s now widely understood that product reviews often increase conversion rates by a double-digit percentage.

#8: WWAD (What Would Amazon Do)?

Ben Edelman of Harvard Business School has a great report describing how some affiliates use pop-ups, pop-unders, IFRAMEs and other little-known industry mechanisms to trick a user?s browser into downloading an affiliate?s cookie for multiple merchants?even when the user hasn?t clicked on an actual affiliate link. When the user then goes to one of the soon-to-be-defrauded merchants and makes a purchase, the affiliate scammer?s cookie claims credit for the conversion.

#7: Affiliates are risky. Don?t let them pick your pocket.

The marketing funnel is a relatively oldschool marketing concept but remains very relevant today. It describes the manner in which most consumers go about making purchasing decisions. In the beginning, consumers cast a wide net?just like the wide top of a funnel. They do broad-ranging research and consider a number of products from a number of providers. But then most consumers start to narrow their choices. Their research becomes more targeted, and they look at fewer products as they figure out what they really want. Finally, they?re at that narrow bottom of the funnel, having decided on the one product that best suits their needs. But last-click marketing ignores this critical funnel concept. If a consumer visits, say, a number of Web sites several times over many days (including a few visits to BestBuy.com), weeks or even months before making a purchase?and is exposed to a wide variety of online media during that time period?why does the keyword he clicked on right before buying a new computer at Bestbuy.com get all the credit for his new laptop purchase? It doesn?t make sense.

#6: Only lemmings focus on last-click marketing

Try to understand what marketing channels or products drive these less desired customers and make appropriate adjustments to reduce them or at least make them more profitable.