Marketing itself has evolved along with the Internet. Before the Internet became a part of our everyday lives, marketing was taken at face value. Advertising had 3 major outlets: TV, radio and print. When you saw a mom in her kitchen surrounded by her children and she told you that her hands have never felt so soft and yes, even the dishes where sparkly clean and it's all because of her dish washing soap, you believed the advertisement. We have to build relationships of trust with our customers versus telling them to buy because today's audience is much more discerning and diverse... we have to be.

We no longer have 2 or 3 different types of "dish soap" either. Our lives have become much more complex and we are flooded with an onslaught of information as well as marketing campaigns. How do most people navigate through this on slot in the hope of making the most informed decision?  We take the easiest route possible by asking our friends and family who may have done the research already. How do we contact them all in a mass collaborative manner... social media.

If everyone is using social media to voice their opinion, stay connected and get the small bits of information about products and services, why is your business not already there so they can share your page? With so much social media options available to you, it can be easy to go a little crazy and open 12 different accounts across the net. The difficult part at the point in time is the time it would take to manage them all. The trick is to concentrate your efforts on the most widely used outlets of social media. We recommend the top 3: Facebook (the most viable and valuable of the 3), LinkedIn and Twitter. Keep in mind that these powerful marketing tools are in no way a substitute for a web site and should be utilized to draw people to your web or ecommerce site, hence the term "social media marketing".

Facebook

Why use Facebook?

• More than 800 million active users and growing.
• 50% of which, login and interact with each out on a daily basis and are out of college.
• It's fastest-growing demographic is 25 years and older.
• It offers a 2-way conversation with your prospective and current customers
• You can easily manage the page yourself
• Offers extremely helpful analytics
• Increases SEO visibility

LinkedIn

Why use LinkedIn?

• More than 130 million users.
• Largest professional networking site.
• More than 2 million companies have LinkedIn Company Pages
• Perfect for looking for potential employees.
• A great way to showcase expertise.
• Counts executives from all 2011 Fortune 500 companies as members.

Twitter

Why use Twitter?

• More than 300 million users.
• The fastest growing social media site.
• generates over 300 million "tweets" and 1.6 billion search queries per day.
• largest demographic is 35 to 44 years old.
• Allows for short and instant communication 140 characters at a time.
• Helps you stay on top of your industry and marketing segment. Using Twitter Search, you can find out what people are saying about a particular topic, enabling you to keep your ear to the ground about your company and the competition.