The ‘hoopla' is about creating relationships with website visitors from all over the world and getting your message out instantly when you need to … and have people actually listen to it! The concept isn't much different than how e-mail marketing was suppose to work, in that you would e-mail a message to people that were genuinely interested and they would listen.

Imagine having a following of 400 people that actually want to read tips, tricks, product updates, sales or any other pertinent information pertaining to your industry. And better yet, they may take that information and easily pass it on to their followers! It is quite possible to touch thousands of people with one tweet on twitter.com (more about this tactic below).

The trick to successful Social media updates is two-fold; you must create both a personal and professional relationship with your friends / followers and your posts need to be valuable, captivating or personal. Let me put it this way, treat your Social Media community as your friends and share fun personal stuff so they can get to know you. It needs to be a good balance of about 60% professional posts and 40% personal posts.

I'll expand with some post examples:

Here is a fun personal post that doesn't digress but let's my followers learn a little bit about me:

“@emilyleach is enjoying the break in hot temperature to do some work on my sailboat”

Here is an example of a professional post:

“@emilyleach is wondering if facebook is updating its homepage? embedded url after”

Another fantastic tip for your posts is to ask a question; like “how do you use facebook?”, or “what is your favorite way to spend a rainy day?”. This is unlimited in the information you can get in return and use as marketing material for your business. I would recommend once a week posting a direct question that will help you understand your following audience.

The biggest mistake I see in the implementation of Social Media is hitting the ground pounding out a sales pitch, no interaction, just sales pitch after sales pitch. Would you want to see that? Then don't do it, just remember this process isn't fast in most cases.

Another great way to learn how to use Social Media is to spend a little bit of time each day just reading the posts of your friends / followers and see what sounds interesting to you. If you are using twitter.com then look for posts that have the RT in front of the post. This stands for “re-tweet”, which means that this person ran across a post they found interesting or valuable and “re-tweeted” it so their followers could see it. That is how messages can go viral.

Also, make sure to promote your Social Media accounts on your webpage, business card, brochures and even your e-mail signature. This venue is still very new to some and expected by others, embrace it!