Social media tools available

With so many social media tools available, the choice of which ones to use can be overwhelming, and many people feel pressured to use as many as they can. But, in fact, the success of your social media campaign depends less on how many different kinds of social media you use than on how effectively you use each one as part of one coherent strategy. There are two main steps toward achieving this:
Know your business’s strengths and weaknesses. For example, if you’re a business that doesn’t use any kind of professional imaging in your product offering, you wouldn’t choose to use Flickr and engage with its community of photography enthusiasts. One the other hand, if you publish regular research and how to documents, you could connect much more effectively with your target market by contributing to Yahoo! Answers and a niche finance wiki or holding Meet ups where you provide workshops about.
Know your target market. By knowing where your target market engages online, you’ll better be able to choose which social media tactics will be more effective. For example, if you’re targeting upper-level executives, you’re likely to have more success on sites like Linkedln and Plaxo then on sites like MySpace that have a younger user demographic.
Engaging properly with a social media channel requires a time commitment, so the more tools you use, the more time you’ll spend managing those separate campaigns and engaging with each separate audience. And letting this interaction slide can be bad for your brand’s perception: for example, if you don’t follow up with a customer comment or question on Facebook due to lack of time, that customer could see your business as one that doesn’t respond to its customers, which could result in the customers’ moving to another competitor to get the desired product or service. As always, you should measure the returns of any social media tools you use so that you can see which ones give you real returns.