My view is that having a good website is not enough, you also need traffic if your site is going to be a commercial success.

Social media is an inexpensive way of alerting prospects and customers to what you do,

For example, if I ran a washing machine repair business, I can search for people in my area complaining that their machine has just broken down and offer to help them with that problem?

If my business was online, I could point people to a resource that might help them – for instance, I offer a lot of usability book suggestions when people ask, as I’ve bought a few in my time and feel comfortable talking about my experience when I read them I might not sell one of my courses from that, but I might get a newsletter sign-up, or a recommendation from the person I helped. That helps establish online credibility – and in a public way if that interaction is conducted on twitter.

So, I can use twitter to form online relationships with people I can help, and people who can help me.

The relationship shouldn’t go straight into “sell” mode, but more to make the person aware that your business has special knowledge and skills that may help them in future.

Social media is certainly a lot cheaper and immediate than SEO and PPC campaigns that you might run to improve your business’s exposure to prospects and customers.

I don’t think looking at twitter in isolation makes much sense when you’re new to it – you need to check out tools like tweetdeck and twitterfeed to really understand how you can market your business online. That long stream of tweets that wizzes past your eyes can be quite bewildering.- Check out my blog posts on Taming Twitter for more information.

I hope that makes sense – do come back to me if you have any more questions about social media marketing!