Samir Balwani, in a guest post on www.techipedia.com, says that recognizing social media as a marketing tool is less important than realizing whether or not it is worth it for your business to use social media in the first place. Does social media add value to your business when “profitability, increased revenue, and efficient use of time” are all taken into consideration? Balwani states that “social media returns are not only difficult to measure, but also impossible to forecast,” so how can you know whether you should invest in Social Media Marketing (SMM), or not? Well, as Balwani suggests, you should consider where your business falls in the categories of High Return Industries or Low Return Industries in the market.

High Return Industries are: Restaurants and Hospitality, Businesses with Return Customers, Large Brands, and Online Driven Companies. Low Return Industries are: Businesses with only a few clients, and Impulse-Driven Products.

For further consideration, think about a question posed by Jan-Willem van Beek in the post, “Social Media is No Holy Grail.” Van Beek asks, “How does social media relate to meaningful communication?”  He lists three types of relevance in social media: social relevance, functional relevance, and contextual relevance. Unless you have all of these, social media may not be the place for your company at this time. Knowing that before jumping into a full-scale SMM approach will save you time and money.

What does your business need to consider before using SMM?

Facebook is one of the many successful social media tools that is becoming an integral part of many peoples lives. In September 2009 Facebook passed the 3 million user mark. That is a huge market of  technically literate and probably affluent consumers for your business. What is more Facebook allows access to these customers 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. 

However the value add is not just those 3 millions individual users. It is the links between them and the information they share that creates the huge payback. What is more this interconnectedness within Facebook grows on a daily basis.

At crisis times Facebook can become a real central point of people’s lives. For example relatives of  victims of the Samoan Tsunami have this week be using Facebook to contact relatives and see photographs of the devastation there. Although they have been able to use the telephone, it was the ability to view photos and share comments amongst their community that has been the real source of support.

For many Facebook users their social network often becomes an important way to gain information. For those of us with family and friends spread across the globe it has become a valuable way to informally keep in contact. It is suprising how often a random comment or posting results in a link or some valuable new information. It is this review and recommendation role that Facebook is acquiring that should make it deeply interesting to any one thinking about building brand awareness.

To make the most of  Facebook Brands need to work with companies like SociaLNK who have a deep understanding of social media. Together we can build a strategy to take full advantage of this powerful phenomenon.