Social Media is not a Panacea for Many Business! Depending on marketing budget, headcount and size of company, some businesses will fail miserably using Social Media Marketing.

Many smaller businesses don’t have adequate resources, knowledge of the marketing processes, sufficient technical expertise to leverage web-based platforms that don’t always behave properly (think updating a Squidoo Lens), etc. Our Practical Advice for Using Social Media For Business:

1) Don’t believe the media pundits raving about tremendous success companies find using Facebook, Twitter or whatever VC-backed/20something wunderkind company is being touted via your Tech Columnist du jour!!

Don’t get us wrong, the media is great at pointing out that next great horizon that could reshape your business; but, details are the religion of success, not sexy five start review by reporters who aren’t worried about making a payroll.

2) Set up a budget and stick to it; start off small with one or two types of Social Media Marketing Activities. We’d suggest  Blogging as a first start; when you have 2-4 months of successful blogging under your digital belt then move to Twitter, Facebook or YouTube video development.

3) Be prepared to make a great deal of investment before you make any payoff for your efforts - time takes time right? Well Social Media Marketing is no different - unless your Ashton Kutcher or today’s hot starlet of the moment you won’t have 50,000 Followers on Twitter overnight.

4) Think about partnering with an online advertising firm that has some broad experience - yep, we are in the biz so self-serving to say so. But, if we could only tell you the tails of the orphan marketing campaigns that have died in the dust with insufficient budget, knowledge or human resources invested in the campaign.

5) Again, don’t get lost in the Social Media Hype Machine - old fashioned Press Releases still help to get your brand established and email campaigns, if done properly, still generate a great returns.

6) At the end of the day, your business needs and should use social media marketing - it’s in high growth mode and you want to have a presence when/where your customers visit online. There’s lots of free resources to generate a presence online via social media sites:

Squidoo Pages are free, great way to build a presence in this vibrant community and traffic back to your site.

Hub Pages are similar to Squidoo and give you visibility and links back to your site.

Upload those digital pictures floating around by setting up a Flickr Account - don’t forget to link them and do a good job on the descriptions.

Ping.Fm is a great web based service that let’s you upload a message/post/text to multiple Social Media Sites - there’s a list of 50-100 sites on their site. Challenge is setting up accounts for all; if you do, use the same email address and password to save time.

Google has a ton of free services that you can utilize to set up visibility within their “information silos” including Google Maps - great for organic search ranking if done properly.

We’ll have more thoughts on Practical Advice for Using Social Media Marketing for Business moving forward - bookmark us or follow our TwitterStream: http://www.Twitter/LinkedMedia