With the onslaught of social media in the last 10 years, the ever constant question is, what can it do for my business and my business blog?

First, why should you bother with social networking sites (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter) if you’re in business? It’s the numbers. If you want customers, you need to go where they are online. Let’s be clear:

• Social networking now accounts for 22% of all time spent online in the US.
• Twitter processed more than one billion tweets in December 2009 and averages almost 40 million tweets per day.
• Over 25% of U.S. internet page views occurred at one of the top social networking sites in December 2009, up from 13.8% a year before.
• The number of social media users age 65 and older grew 100 percent throughout 2010, so that one in four people in that age group are now part of a social networking site.
• As of June 2011 Facebook has 750 Million users.
• Facebook tops Google for weekly traffic in the U.S.
• Social Media has overtaken pornography as the No. 1 activity on the web.

One of the questions is always, what are your expectations and goals for using social media to advance your business and blog? If you expect that your business blog is going to skyrocket off the Google charts, then you’re in for a disappointment.

Social media is a tool, plain and simple. Albeit a strong one, and it should be one of many tools you have in your marketing toolbox. Not the only tool.

I always advise clients and colleagues to stick to the major social media site icons, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest. There are social media sites that are niche-oriented, such as GoodReads for authors.

If you’d like readers to share your content with their social media audience, make it easy for them to find your share links. I like to use Shareaholic.com or as in this case, as it enables you to list as many of the social media icons you’d like.

Once your post is published, do NOT auto-feed it into the networks (see “Say NO to Auto-Feeds:Your Blog & Facebook, Social Sites.”) Because your audience is different, depending on the site, you may want to customize the post in the status update.

On Facebook, I also post it to the notes section. If you have a business page, this is a great way to get your content out to a larger audience. Remember, Google indexes content on pages. The more keyword rich your content is, the more likely it will be that Google will pick it up.

Don’t worry about duplicate content or the fact that it may find your content on Facebook and not on your blog…..just make sure that you link it back to your blog.

It is key to follow-up on any discussion, comments, etc. that are posted once you have shared your content. If someone shares your posting, thank them. Keep the conversation going; that is key to any relationship on social media…..that is why you’re there in the first place.

There are many benefits to sharing your content on social media sites. The primary benefit is to get more readers to your blog, build your list (which is where the gold is) and to find possible joint venture partners. Of course, there are others, but these are the top three.

Again, I like to reiterate, this is just another tool in your toolbox for your marketing strategy. Don’t rely on just one. Each tool has a purpose and if used correctly, they all work together.

Although today’s post was originally posted on Writing on the Web, this was written by me!