Many of my clients excitedly call me asking “what about all this social media stuff, shouldn’t I be involved too?” What I inevitably reply is “Maybe”.

That might sound like a wishy-washer answer, but the fact of the matter is, it depends on the business, and the resources available to develop social media efforts.

Just like everything else, social media takes time and effort to develop. A business needs to analyze their needs, determine what markets they are trying to reach through social media, and then develop a solid plan that will most effectively reach these markets.

For markets involving 19 - 26 year olds and stay-at-home mom types and women ages 36-50, Facebook is the best networking community today. That doesn’t mean it will be tomorrow, however, and it doesn’t mean that you can just open a business Facebook account and Voila! your business is successful.

Instead it takes time and effort to build your account, add friends, get people interested in what you have to offer, develop groups that engage users and provide information they are interested in.

If information is your trade, then promoting articles through ezines (an old-hat process these days) and submitting multiple articles from a blog to social bookmarking sites like Digg and Buzzfeed can work wonders for your traffic. But you’d better be sure your site is engaging enough to encourage clicks to further items on your site - clicks coming from these sites usually generate a one-time-shot; visitors are gone just as soon as the article or information is read.

The best success for businesses on the internet today is to implement a combination of social media efforts, online website features and functionality, and offerings that meet the information needs of your potential clients. You can add zip and excitement to increase your traffic, but traffic alone doesn’t create customers! Of course, more traffic isn’t a bad goal, but it isn’t the most significant goal.

Finally, any significant social media campaign requires you to keep track of what works better than others, so you can eliminate the time necessary for unsuccessful efforts. As an example, in the “social bookmarking” wars, I’ve found so far that StumbleUpon is a very low lead-generating site. With just as many of my articles and information submitted to StumbleUpon and Digg, I always get better results from Digg. Buzzfeed and Yahoo! Buzz are two more sites that actually get some visibility for normal sites like mine.

Bottom line - don’t just jump onto the social media bandwagon because it seems like a cool idea. Take time to research your options, determine what potential markets you need to reach and where they gather, and start developing a strategy that meets the needs of your business and your potential clients.