To use social media effectively you need a strategy, says social commerce expert, Warren Knight (www.warrenknight.co.uk/blog)

Too many SMEs are signing up to different social networks and not seeing the return on their investment. Why is this?, he asks.

First you must understand who your target audience is online. There are some great tools to help you with that; www.quantcast.com helps define, buy and deliver to lookalike audiences of millions across the web.

Over a third of SMEs use social media on a daily basis to promote their businesses, new research has revealed.

A survey of 269 companies conducted by Daryl Willcox Publishing found that half (54%) used social media – and 35% of these said they posted updates every day to platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. A quarter of companies updated every few days, while 17% used social media platforms weekly.

In today’s cutback economy of slashed budgets impacting marketing capacity, the question of spending priorities becomes acute, writes Daren Bach on Business Scene.

Advocates of Twitter will say it’s essential for business. Other people will say it’s a time waster... So which is it? Read on for Heather Townsend’s guide, based on two month’s experiences of being a tweeter, of how to achieve more with your tweets.

The biggest problem encountered by small online businesses is not money - it's time. You don't always have that ample time to do things that would help in marketing your business, and moving into Twitter marketing does not only consumes time, it's also complicated as well due to many information that are readily available online.

But that's exactly why you should use Twitter - it's simple, intuitive and it doesn't take much time! With Twitter, you can:

Everything the home business need to know by Mark Ramskill of SubHub.

For those of you that have somehow missed the hype, Twitter - http://twitter.com - is the quickly growing social networking and micro-blogging service, which having been quickly adopted by key influencers in the online world, then by bloggers, content publishers, journalists and marketers, is now being jumped on by the public at large.