All the buzz in internet marketing these days is about social media. You’ve heard of sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg and LinkedIn to name a few, but many small business owners are inadvertently doing things the wrong way.

The most common mistake business people make with social media, is to use it as just another way to spread a sales message. This approach often brings poor results and turns people away.

What we advocate is to simply share quality content. Go in with the sole intention to provide value through good advice and you will find many people respond positively.

A good example is the use of direct messages on Twitter. Many people using Twitter for marketing have some sort of bot which will search for any tweets with a particular keyword and automatically send them a DM. This is spam, anyway you slice it and it’s got to the point where people don’t even check their direct messages anymore.

A much better strategy is to use the @replies function. Depending on your niche, there are usually not that many tweets using your targeted keyword to which you can send a reply which will help them.

We recommend doing this manually to personalize each message and only if the article or other link you wish to share is relevant. The difference is the person will often thank you for taking the time to send them the information.