Businesses today can no longer ignore the massive potential of internet marketing. If you are a business that is serious about being successful, social media is something you just cannot afford to disregard. You might have a website in place and you might even have optimized all the content to target search engine traffic. And sure, you might be getting a decent amount of traffic as well. But by creatively using social media, you can achieve explosive growth in a very short time, which is not possible by using SEO tactics alone.

If you are not considering using social media, you must seriously rethink that. There are millions of people logging onto online social networks every single day. By using these networks, you can create a level of awareness and traffic that is much higher and faster than by using SEO tactics alone.

Take the example of SocialMediaExaminer.com which provides information on how to use social media to your advantage. Looks like you need to pay some serious attention to what they have to say because SocialMediaExaminer.com has been in existence only since October 2009, but it already has more than 100,000 visitors each month, and a large majority of the traffic comes from social media channels. Michael Stelzner, the founder of the website says that you can grow into a mega player practically overnight if the right social media techniques are employed.

The website SocialMediaExaminer.com was started when the founder, Michael Stelzner, realized that there aren’t any websites on social media that are purely educational. Heavyweights like Mashable.com talk about a lot of other things and do not concentrate just on social media. To meet this need, Stelzner created the website.

They have come out with a report on social media – the 2010 Social Media Marketing Industry Report – where many Business to Business and (B to B) Business to Customer (B to C) firms were interviewed on how they are using social media, and what their results are.

Firms must act now if they want to stay ahead of the curve. Social media, even though it is creating quite a lot of buzz, has been very active only since the last year and a half or so. Firms that use effective social media techniques now will have a great first mover advantage.

Social media is really the hottest thing right now. You need to know how to use it effectively whether you are a small, medium or large scale business. And it is precisely this advantage that social media gives businesses. Here, size does not matter. A small mom and pop shop can engage as effectively with customers as other large scale and high profile businesses, provided they use creative social media techniques.

The social media marketing report has come out with an interesting finding – B to B firms have been using social media much longer than B to C firms. B to C companies are relatively new entrants who have come into the field taking advantage of all the preliminary groundwork and heavy lifting that have been done by B to B companies before them.

The report also says that Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook are the most popular social media tools. Facebook has over 420 million users and there are above 20 millions tweets a day. There is a very high chance that the customers that you target are active users of either one or both of these channels. There is a captive audience out there, your target market.

The report suggests that blogs are going to be the number one tool in community building. Most companies use social media to drive traffic to their blog which is then used to build an active community.

Social media is a powerful enabler that delivers results in a way that is much faster than any traditional means of marketing. Do not ignore it.