Enter this new thing, social media marketing; (well, its really not that new—just takes us baby boomers a while to catch up) that is, using sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Myspace to promote your business.

So you’ve signed up for accounts on one or many of these sites and have yet to do anything with it since your welcome email.  The good news is that you’ve started to learn about social marketing tools, because they’re not going away.  Why?  Because they can help you effectively market your business and they’re FREE.

What’s the next step?  Identify what the heck you’re going to say to all those people out there, without embarrassing yourself, but that’s easy.  Im sure you’ve heard your kids referring to social networking websites, people having fun, sharing recipes, tweeting while in line at the coffee shop.  Well  there’s a huge difference between what they’re doing and how you want to spend your time social marketing.  Your goal is to leverage social marketing to make some connections, get your business name out in front of people, build a reputation and make money.

Since these are FREE opportunities to promote your business to thousands of people you could never reach locally and internationally, I say go nuts with it!  But a word of caution, ‘Don’t Be Obnoxious’, meaning don’t tweet ten times a day about your company—unless you’re counting down a contest or something .  Make sure that your information is relevant, interesting and/or thought provoking.  Promote company specials and promotions, announce new hires and news about your company, write articles (blog) drawing on your expertise and post pictures of special events.

Consider social media sites your very own free advertising section of the Sunday paper, except you get to do it everyday if you like and you won’t get an invoice in the mail.  Most importantly when you’re choosing a blog (a site where you can submit your articles) , a WordPress blog is the search engine’s (specifically Google’s)  favorite place to visit.  Which means hundreds or even thousands more people will find your site than would if you didn’t have a WordPress blog.

Now you know what to tweet on Twitter and post on your LinkedIn and Facebook business pages.  Next, I’ll share some different ways to keep track of your social marketing activities.