Many companies have a hard time understanding how best to use social media to promote their business online. It’s not that the principles of Facebook, Twitter and the others are difficult to grasp - they’re not - but, the real business potential can be a lot harder to fathom out. Since social media marketing works differently between businesses depending on what their aims are, there are no guarantees that what works for one will work for another.

That’s the beauty of social media, it’s flexible enough to accommodate an incredibly varied range of marketing approaches and still deliver success. It’s not a strict medium.

An uncomfortable fact of today’s commercial world is that people no longer trust messages from companies, on the whole. This makes marketing an increasingly precision process where even the most meticulously crafted promotions risk failure.

What people do trust is word-of-mouth recommendations, and this has always been the case. These recommendations come from fellow customers (or potential customers) and they come with an inherent credibility that companies can rarely match in their own communications. Social media is the biggest opportunity for word-of-mouth recommendations, well, ever. It has a worldwide span, it’s instantly accessible to anyone from anywhere, it’s permanently available, it’s accumulative and it all leads back to your door.

Word-of-mouth has grown from local to global, and it’s going on right now in tweets, Facebook posts, blogs and forums. Failure, refusal or just a straight-forward inability to get into social media for business marketing is tantamount to ignoring the latest incarnation of the most effective form of advertising of all-time. Is that something your business can afford to do?