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A news item on our sister website, bobscottsInsights.com, noted last week that a Southern California accounting software reseller had topped 20,000 followers on its Twitter site. To be precise, Rose Business Solutions had 22,906 followers and was following 24,764. And that was just one of three sites of sister companies. This is not to suggest that accounting firms figure out how to steer thousands of followers to their sites, but to raise the question on what social media does, an answer that seems to vary dramatically by industry.

Rose is a company with less than $5 million in annual revenue and one of the best gauges of how dramatically different its use of Twitter is from the typical CPA firm is that multi-billion Deloitte had only 4,496 followers for the same period. The news item immediately generated a response from a reselling competitor suggesting that having such a large number of followers wasn't necessarily the best way to use Twitter.

So what's the best way to use social media? A lot of businesses are still asking that question. There's general agreement that at the minimum these sites represent a relatively easy and inexpensive way for a company to get its name before prospects. Beyond that, there's not a lot of agreement.

Linkedin's search capabilities provide a basic tool for finding people with certain job characteristics and histories, a pretty good way to track those with difficult-to-find skills. The benefit of its expanding number of groups is not yet clear and the effectiveness of ads placed on Linkedin has produced wildly varying results.

Twitter provides an online tool for performing functions similar to old-fashioned direct mail. There are fans, a minority it seems, who say it is a highly valuable tool, and a much larger number who are totally baffled by the electronic outlet and its 140-character limit on Tweets. It's certainly a good way to blast out offers and specials for companies that use that use those tools as a regular part of their business.

Facebook provides a bit of a bad taste for those who don't like to combine personal posts with businesses. But it's clear from last year's more than 24-hour computer outage at Intuit that a website can play an extremely valuable role. With most other electronic tools shut down, Intuit used its ProLine Facebook page to provide information about the status of its systems since posts could be made from other systems.

So the answer of what social media does and how effective these sites are? It depends, which is pretty much the answer for every other marketing tool.

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