Social media and email have a strong relationship, and multiple studies have found that social media users are actually more likely to see and respond to your email marketing message.

A study by MarketingSherpa found, for example, that social media users actually check their email much more than people who do not use social media. 42% of social media users checked their email four times a day or more, compared to just 27% of non-social media users. Therefore, social media users are more likely to see, and act upon, your email marketing messages.

Another MarketingSherpa study found that 75% of daily social media users said that email is the most effective way for companies to communicate with them, compared to 65% of all email users. Also, 49% of Twitter users said they purchased something online because of an email they received, compared to 33% of all email users. This makes sense, because typically social media users are tech-savvy and more likely to understand and use all the valuable tools the internet offers.

63% of the people surveyed by MarketingSherpa said they use the same email account for social media messages as they do for email subscriptions. This is also great news for email marketers, as they know their messages are seen and their audience is more easily accessible.

In previous posts I’ve covered how to provide content that is relevant and valuable to your target audience. If you supply this content to your subscribers, they are very likely to share it within their network. When a social media user shares your email message on a social networking site, your message then has the potential to reach the user’s friends, and then their friends, and then their friends. Social media provides the ultimate viral marketing. With very little effort, your audience just increased significantly because of one valuable email. According to Silverpop, email messages that are then posted have an average increase in reach of over 24.3%. Silverpop believes this a conservative estimate, and as social network usage grows, so will the increase in reach.

The bottom line: Get involved in both social media and email marketing in order to expand your audience and get the most out of your site.

Fortunately, most of these popular social media websites are free to use and are a sure way to help you increase your traffic, get a better search engine ranking, build a name for yourself, and promote interactivity while maintaining customer relations.

I compiled a list of 7 popular social media sites that I suggest you look into if you want to market your business on the web more effectively. I have used these to market my own law practice, and the benefits are hard to ignore.

1) Facebook – Facebook is the world's biggest social networking site. The best way to market your business on Facebook is to create a “Fan Page” and encourage your customers to join. This way you can easily notify them when you have updates to share such as specials or important news about your business.

2) Yelp – Yelp is one of the most popular review sites for local businesses written by customers. It is important to have your local business reviewed on Yelp, as these reviews are used by customers to make decisions on what businesses are the best for them.

3) Twitter – Twitter is a “micro-blogging” social networking site where members send each other short messages and status updates. It is gaining popularity by the minute. Members can see what other members are “tweeting about,” follow these other members if they find their “tweets” interesting, and share their own messages on this micro-blogging platform.

4) YouTube – YouTube is the number one video-sharing website where members can share and comment on each other’s videos. You Tube can be used to establish yourself as an expert in your industry by creating “how-to” videos that show your specialization. To direct traffic to your website, you can even link the videos you upload to your website.

5) LinkedIn – LinkedIn is the most popular business-oriented social networking site with over 400,000 registered users. This is a great website to find potential business partners as well as customers who may be interested in what your business has to offer.

6) Digg – Digg is a popular news-sharing website where members post links to their favorite news article and make comments. If you receive a good rating on an article that includes a link to your site, it will result in a large increase in your traffic.

7) Delicious – Delicious is a popular bookmarking site in which members save links to their favorite websites or articles and share them with other people. When members write comments, it links to their personal profile where they can include a link to their website. The more comments you write, the more you promote your site, resulting in increased traffic.

By joining these sites, you will be able to introduce yourself to new customers and learn more about what consumers are looking for. You can also potentially build a network of loyal customers who may be likely spread the word about your business in various locations all over the Internet. As you may know, word-of-mouth advertising from a trusted source is the most effective type of advertising.

Whatever our reasons for blogging – whether it be for hobby, to give advice, or a way of earning an income – we all need one core thing in order for our blogs to succeed: readers. Without them, what’s the point? Twitter is a potential source of massive numbers of new readers, based on them seeing links to your blog from other members. But how can you get people to Tweet links to your blog? Quite simply, it all comes down to whether or not your readers feel that your content is worth passing on to people they know. Creating a Tweet-worthy post means you essentially have to give something to your readers, whether this is new information, a good old fashioned laugh, or a talking point. Here are a few hints on creating a blog post that’s worth Tweeting.

Give it a Good Title

The title is the first thing your regular readers will see. If your article is a witty one, make your title witty. If it’s going to tell your readers something new, make sure they know through the title that by reading it they’ll get some information. Include a word or two that gives a clear indication of what it’s all about. Take this post’s title, for example. The post is about writing blog posts that people will want to share on Twitter. The title gives an indication of this. However, an overly long title can be off-putting. Keep it snappy.

When Blogging the News, Have Something Special to Say

Plenty of us blog on the news or current events. Or we may blog on issues being covered on a good number of other blogs and sites. That in itself is fine, providing you add a new dimension to it. If you just post a link to another news article on some other site and say “Here, read this,” why would your readers then link to your site? Why would they not just link directly to the original site from which you sourced the story? You need to add a new spin to material like this. Add your own opinion or commentary. Make it more valuable to the reader. There should be something they can gain or find out from your site, whether it’s an opinion or analysis, that they could not gain just from reading the original story.

Unique Content

Whether you’re discussing a news article that’s doing the rounds on millions of sites or you’re writing your own piece completely from your own head, your content should be unique. Having word-for-word copies of something else online will do you no SEO favors and will do your readers no favors. It comes back down to the big, “Why would I share this?” question. Why, if ten sites are showing exactly the same piece, would people share yours? Keeping it unique means that your blog is the only place your regular readers can send new readers to to access that very article.

Be Human

Let your personality shine through in your blog posts. More personable posts are generally more reader friendly, and it’s the more reader friendly of your posts that will receive the most benefit from people passing on your link through Twitter. Being human in your blog lets your readers feel as though they know you to an extent. If they know you and like you, they are more likely to want to share your content with their own contacts. While business blogs obviously require a level of professionalism, you can easily maintain this without being almost sterile about your posts.

Keep to your Niche

It’s something of a pet peeve of mine to go onto blogs I follow almost religiously and find frequent off topic posts. We all wander from topic from time to time. But as an example, I used to follow a blog about personal finance. And then over the course of a week the blog author had made 4 separate posts about entirely unrelated items, such as gadget related posts. I wasn’t following his blog for gadget information, and so after the 4th post, I un-followed and was done with it. The people who are most likely to Tweet your posts are your regular readers. They’re regular readers because they’re interested in your subject matter. If you go off topic, you risk losing their interest altogether.

Read Before You Post

Once you’ve completed an article it, read it. And then reread it. Ask yourself, ‘what do my readers gain by reading this?’ Do you give them hints? Do you make them laugh? Do you cause them to stop and think? If you can’t identify anything your readers gain, consider rewriting before posting. There has to be a reason for someone to Tweet your blog post.

As I’ve mentioned already, Twitter is a phenomenal way in which you can reach out and attract new readers. While your own Twitter account is good means of publicizing your posts, you ideally want your readers to feel compelled to share it too, thus extending your network of readers. Taking a bit of time to perfect your posts can grant massive reward in this way.

Here is a photo of the fake email:

As Peter notes, this spoof capitalizes on the fact that Twitter has become very well known, meaning that people who don't know much about it might still be inclined to download a file.  A legitimate Twitter invite, of course, contains a link to the inviter's Twitter page where you can click to follow or block.

I suspect that some hacker will soon corrupt this process, meaning that like PayPal, you will want to avoid directly clicking a link in an email – instead you will want to head directly to your Twitter account and deal with followers directly from your home base.

The Smiths, to their credit, have leveraged the free exposure.  Danielle Smith's blog, ExtraordinaryMommy.com has received thousands of visitors and hundreds of incoming links (like this one) as this story circulates around the web.

The lesson: do not post any photo onto a photo sharing site that you do not want appearing on a billboard in an eastern European country, and leverage web traffic any way you can!

• Twitter
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• YouTube
• StumbleUpon
• del.icio.us
• digg
• flickr
• yelp
• Mixx
• Reddit

These social networking sites can be useful if you want to learn what industry leaders are doing and thinking.  I frequently learn about new tools, websites and tactics from some of the people I follow.

The problem, of course, is time.  How do you follow a couple dozen thought leaders on multiple networking sites?  One elegant solution is called FriendFeed.  FriendFeed is basically a social networking site aggregator.  Once you sign up as a user, you enter all of your social networking feeds into a simple form, then save.  Next, you allow FriendFeed access to your email account to search for other FriendFeed users.

You can then "subscribe" to other FriendFeed users and other users can "subscribe" to you.  Every day thereafter, FriendFeed will send you an email digest of posts and activity by those in your subscription list.  This email digest is a fast and convenient way to keep up with any social networking activity by those on your list, all in one place.

Obviously the big drawback is that you can only subscribe to your target if that person has a FriendFeed account.  Still, for those who do participate in this service, it is a breeze to quickly track what they are up to.

If you are interested and want to subscribe to me, the link is http://friendfeed.com/jginsberg.