Effective marketing campaigns these days must include social media. Your competitors are gaining a competitive advantage over you if you aren’t embracing social media methods of connecting with your customers. It’s where your customers are.

Social media is an octopus. It invades everything on the Internet and will create a huge mess if you don’t take it seriously. Those tools are fast becoming the single most important way to attract new business customers and sustain old ones.

Actually, social media marketing tools bring us within reach of the ultimate marketer’s dream: reaching the right audience with the right offer at exactly the right time. They reveal who is using your social media content, what they are doing with it and what they want. Social media tools allow you to focus on smaller, more meaningful targets instead of a broad, undefined audience. You gain open collaboration, constructive conversations with your customers. Customers now have the ability to talk to brands: directly interacting with them online socially.

Lots of people – your prospects and customers – are using Facebook™, Twitter™, YouTube™ and others. You can’t afford NOT to participate. People talk to each other using these channels. They talk about what they do, what they like, what they buy. Customers trust their online friends’ recommendations almost as much as they trust their real-life friends’ advice. You can’t buy better advertising for any amount of money.

When customers want to gather information about a product or service, they Google™. Utilizing social media will help your company’s product or service appear near the top of their search results.

Using social media also gives you an advantage of being able to monitor the buzz about your business. A dissatisfied customer can easily tell their online network almost immediately. If you use social media and monitor your reputation, you’ll be alerted to such a complaint and be able to respond quickly to address the issue before it gets out of hand. This is an important and powerful tool.

Before you start, don’t forget to develop a solid social media strategy, stick to it and engage your followers. If you do, you are well on your way to becoming an online collaborator and influencer.

Here are a few suggestions to get you started. Start with one of these. Then, as you get more comfortable in the social media space, expand out to another.

1. Facebook: Engage your followers with a Fan Page. Keep them aware of new products or features, weekly specials, events, promotions, contests and place content that will drive traffic to your Website or blog.
2.  Twitter: Follow your followers and those tweeting about what interests you and your business.
3. Blog: Start blogging and add content frequently based on what your customers are looking for. Post informative content and your customers will more likely to give you repeat business.
4.  YouTube Channel: Do you ever wish you had a YouTube video that went viral? I can’t assure you that yours will, but I can guarantee it won’t if you never post a video.
5. Linking Tools: I use Hootsuite.com, but there are many others. You can use them on your computer or cellphone, schedule tweets, reply to tweets, track trends, keywords and see who is talking about your business. You can easily integrate your text message or “ping” to broadcast to all of your social media networks when you choose.

By using these five tools, you will be well on your way to gaining valuable mind share with your customers.

Social media is not an end in itself. It is not the silver bullet for business success. Yet, it is a hugely important tool to include in your marketing strategy. The days of simply ‘broadcasting’ your product, your service, your image, are gone.

Your image is what the customers say it is. To be successful, a business needs to be engaged in open collaboration online with customers via social media.