Social media allows people to connect online to form relationships for personal and business reasons, social media in business can engage their customers faster and individuals can reach other individuals easier.

Other reasons can be:

Business Branding

Networking

Customer Feedback

Direct reach to customer

Communication It has specific means to connect people with each other such as classmates, colleagues, interest groups. find people randomly from their profile of interests.

Multimedia: Users can easily comment and Rate on videos watched, images viewed, or music heard.

Collaboration: Similar to the concept of an encyclopedia, Often used to create collaborative websites to provide intranet and knowledgebase systems.

Social bookmarking / social news: Are tools for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet

in the form of tagging. Mostly used to improve the ranking of webpage.

Social media communication

Eg: Blogger, Twitter

Multimedia Eg: YouTube, Picasa

Collaboration Eg: Wikipedia, Wikileaks

Social bookmarking / social news Eg: Delicious, StumbleUpon

Social media compliance actually enable your employees to use social networks from any device and for all the protection you need to meet strict regulatory requirements. Through Social Media Compliance you can connect your employees with endless business opportunities as It extend the reach and effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

Social Media Monitoring:

It is the systematic observation and analysis of social media contributions and dialogues in discussion forums & web logs.

Such as Facebook or Myspace.

To gain a quick overview or insight into topics & opinionS in the social web.

Social media monitoring is carried out continuously.

It is the practice of gathering data from blogs and social media websites and analyzing that data to make business decisions.

The most common use of social media analytics is to mine customer sentiment in order to support marketing and customer service activities.

Social Media Analytics

Social media management solutions can help you manage outbound and incoming online interactions — along with other small business marketing activities — in a more efficient manner.

They streamline and consolidate how you listen, participate in relevant conversations.

Helps you to more easily monitor what people are saying about your business.

Helps you to amplify your social media presence across social networking sites.

Start by figuring out your goal:

What do you hope to achieve with social media? More sales? More prospects? More employees? A combination of these?

Get focused on what you really want to do with social media, and it will make deciding where to start much easier. Also, really think about what kind of value you want to add to the communities you become involved with online.

Ultimately, there isn’t any magic formula for choosing the right social media tools for your business. It’s different for everyone. But starting small and building over time, and not being afraid to experiment, you’ll be well on your way to coming up with the perfect fit for you.