February 2010 - Yellahoose does spend time recommending new and current customers consider using social media tools, like blogs, Facebook and Twitter. Peers, competitors, the web design and development market and the media all seem to indicate organizations must (emphasis on must) use blogs, Facebook and Twitter.

But is that true?

A lot of the people making these recommendations spend a lot of time online, reading blogs, Facebook pages and reviewing Twitter feeds. There are just as many people, many your users and customers, who do not. You don't need to set up a blog, Facebook page or Twitter feed to make your organization competitive.

Consider the pros and cons of social media tools, and think about how these tools might fit in to your organization, and how they'll be managed.

What's good about blogs, Facebook, Twitter

Blogging, Facebook and Twitter and most if not all social media tools are free. Despite the state of the larger economy free and easy-to-use tools for outreach and promotion should at least be looked at.

Social media tools are no longer cutting-edge, they're standard and very widely used. Yellahoose argues that most website designers and developers worth their salt are implementing blogs, Facebook and Twitter as a best practice, the way HTML is validated, pages are optimized for search engines, RSS is installed, etc.

Using blogs, Facebook, Twitter and other good social media tools will (emphasis on will) let people, like your customers, know what you and your organization are doing. That means they'll get updates on news, sales, information updates. They'll re-visit your site. They'll read your content. They'll buy your goods and services.

What's bad about blogs, Facebook, Twitter

You do need to update blogs, Facebook and Twitter, which means someone will need to spend time reviewing and in some cases writing and updating content. We've all seen and some of us have even created blogs with the first "Welcome to my blog!" post and barely anything else. No one's going to monitor a Twitter feed if the feed's not updated with some frequency. Same for Facebook.

Are your users likely to use and get any value from your blog, Facebook page and/or Twitter feed?

So, the conclusion, and what Yellahoose has been recommending: Consider blogging, Facebook, Twitter and other social media tools as part of you and your organization's outreach plans. Remember that social media is only as good as the quality of information and frequency of updates. And if you or your organization can produce regularly updated content, remember that someone will probably need to manage (edit) and update Facebook, Twitter, etc.