I’m sure that most everyone reading this article has at least heard of social networking and many of you are quite aware or it’s power. Sites such as MySpace, YouTube, facebook and Twitter have even been coined as social marketing sites.

In today’s economy it’s more important than ever to connect with as many of your customers as possible and these social marketing sites make that easier than ever. Plus you may very well be one of a very few businesses that utilizes this very powerful tool for communicating with your customers.

Micro-blogging sites such as Twitter have become very popular in the last year or so. Today Twitter enjoys more traffic on a daily basis than the search engine giant Google or that of facebook who itself has passed Google in daily traffic.

The big boys know this to be true and have been signing up for their very own Twitter accounts and hiring employees to monitor these accounts around the clock for nearly a year now. Companies like Dell, General Motors, Comcast, H&R Block, Kodak and Whole Foods Market just to name a few now have employees monitoring Twitter for any mention of their brand and/or company name.

For those of you that have yet to realize the extreme power of social media and that of Twitter in particle you may be wondering WHY these giants would care about what’s being said about them on Twitter?

Every hour of every day there are 100′s of thousands of user scanning Twitter, a single message known as a Tweet, sent in frustration over a product that didn’t meet the consumers expectation can be read by hundreds or even thousands in a matter of hours. You can imagine what this might do to a brand if it was left unanswered. On the other hand a positive interaction with a representative of the company may in fact turn this potentially harmful encounter into one that leaves everyone following that Twitter stream with a very good feeling about the company and the brand.

What’s really happening here is the control of the brand has shifted from the company to the consumer and the companies that adopt a proactive response will come out on top.

The same is true for small business, yes it may be on a much smaller scale but the power of Social Media can have a huge impact on your business as well, and if it’s used correctly it can become one of your most valued assets. The ability to have conversations with customers makes Twitter extremely valuable to any e-commerce site.

If you’re a business owner that delivers much of your products or services virtually (meaning you sale produces or services that are delivered over the internet) you’re going to want to keep a close watch on the blog because over the course of the next few days I’m going to be explaining a method by which you’ll have the opportunity to get in front of your customers on a local and even a global scale using the power of Twitter.

Think of it as your very own small business stimulus package. If you know of anybody that sells products or services and delivers them through downloads, over the phone or over the internet, do them a huge favor and send them a link to this blog. I’m not selling anything and they may even win some cool prizes. The grand prize is valued at nearly $6,000