Businesses are using social media tools to accomplish many goals that were once unachievable due to limited budgets or staff. As one example, expensive focus groups, surveys and market research is free or very low cost if conducted through social media. When using social media for business, it is important to understand the tools, set goals and measure results. According to Jupiter Research, 70 percent of viral marketers report increasing brand awareness as one of the most successful areas of their social marketing campaigns.

Although there are a multitude of ways that social media can be used to help businesses, below are three ideas:

1. Engage with Your Audience and Gather Information. Communities of people are gathering on social media websites. Listen to their conversations to learn what they need and think. Provide a place for networking and dialogue within your target community. Engage in the conversations to start social participation with your brand.
2. Share Information to Educate, Promote and Notify. Social media tools empower businesses to offer real-time information to provide educational resources, highlight news, promote events, inform about emergencies, and showcase products/services.
3. Grow Your Web Presence. Links to your website through social media tools and posts by others will increase web traffic and page rankings. To increase traffic even more, post links to specific web pages to drive traffic to educational information and resources. Search engines like Yahoo! and Google will find information posted on social networking sites to increase your visibility in search engine results.