What have you found useful? What are some of your advice?

Use Twitter to share inspiration, information and to build brand awareness. I use Linked In to build my network and see what topics come up in expert questions. I have been surprised at how successful Twitter has been for getting me in touch with women in business all over the world - I have to admit I entered into it reluctantly!

This is one area of my business that I really want to focus on and have to confess that I am reluctant to enter the world of twitter but increasingly I am hearing how valuable it is . Curious to hear more posts,,

I use twitter to reach out to people I'd like to know and facebook to connect with people I used to know and linked in to network and our blog to extend our brand and cover topics we can't cover in our regular editorial.

I find it incredibly valuable - if time consuming - and it definitely drives traffic to our site and increases our profile.

Being the owner of a company that offers Social Media Strategy as a service I can tell you we use it and we use it a LOT! Here are some of the ways we use it:

- I've gotten media exposure via Twitter (Interviews, Stories on recent work)
- I've gotten business via Twitter and FB.
- Our SEO has improved drastically from using our blog as inbound links and risen drastically and the fresh content keeps Google coming back often. We then take our blog posts and repurpose them by Tweeting them, FB'ing in our groups and status feeds and even on LinkedIn as a status profile.
- We list in ourselves in online directories and create company pages on social media sites like Flckr, Squidoo and Youtube.
- We interview and get interviewed by other bloggers.
- We create quick videos of our recent work and service offerings to share.
- We answer questions in the LInkedIN forums.
- We occasionally host 'Meetups' via meetup.com one relevant topics to our business (ie: health care marketing)
- We use sites like Craigslist, LinkedIn and Odesk.com to hire professionals.
- On our blog we use all sorts of social media call-to-actions (RSS feed, Google Feed, Twitter feed, FB feed, Share this widget ect). www.october17media.com/blog/

That's just to say a few! All of our promotion is online and mostly free!

Consider the powerful reach that Pres.Obama has accomplished using Twitter, etc. It's time for us all (yes, professionals too, not just the kids) to leverage the tools of social media marketing. As a busy entrepreneur, I've done some work on my own (ie. with LinkedIn) but to really ramp up I've recently hired some experts in social media marketing to help kick start (ie Facebook, Twitter,etc) and pull together a comprehensive strategy that I'll be able to effortlessly manage....stay tuned!