People outside of marketing, even online marketing, can have a very poor opinion of social media, some see it as a childish jape, something that is of only any use if you have an urge to tell a number of unidentified strangers that you have bought a new hat.

On a certain level these individuals are correct, the mainstream social networking sites, such as Facebook, Twitter and Myspace, were not conceived to be business marketing tools. A very large number of users have no interest in 'targeting' their followers, and simply use the various services to supply friends and family with these superficial types of updates.

Companies have since started to cotton on to the fact that these services had a ready made user base, waiting credit card in hand to buy their products, and the social networks have responded in order to take advantage of this. Facebook, for example, allows you to place advertising on the side of each page, which can specifically be set to appear only to an audience of your choice; age, gender, location, you name it. This allows you to filter the entire user base of Facebook and target the people who are most likely to purchase your product or service, all this comes for a price of course.

Twitter, which is a different animal than Facebook, is in the mainstream news frequently, usually because a celebrity has 'tweeted' that they had located a lost baby on the way to the supermarket. It is this type of coverage that has resulted in the perception that Twitter is only useful for a constant stream of mindless updates, something which is simply not true.

Companies, both large and small, utilize twitter in ways that outgrow these public perceptions of the tool, for example using it as a direct method of customer support is becoming more and more popular amongst technology firms. Whilst private messages can be used in this situation, public replies work best, as they offer reassurance to the customer that the advice you are giving is accurate, as you don’t mind it being seen by others. This also has another benefit of allowing others to see the advice you are giving one individual, meaning that if another customer has the same issue or problem, then your reply may help them out too, reducing the customer service workload of company.

It is the 'intelligent' targeting aspect that social networking services offer that make them an attractive marketing choice. They make it simple to target specific people, and also to track results. As an example, at Hot Sand, we use Twitter and Facebook, and use them in such a way that they are always synchronised with each other, and also with our website. Using the free web utility Hoot Suite, we are able automatically tweet new blog updates, as we upload them to the website, which are then also posted in turn on our Facebook profile page.

These tweets contain text, and a link to the blog article. The link is a shortened url which provides data on how many people have clicked it wherever it is put. This is important for gauging how well your tweets are attracting interest, and over time allows you to see what topics that you have tweeted your audience are interested in, allowing you to do more of the same in the future.

This chain of events is automatic, and requires only one click from us to set off, and provides our followers (Twitter) and fans (Facebook) an opportunity to keep up to date with us on a regular basis. Used to its full potential, it is this type of 'joined up' social networking that can prove effective in the real world.