Small businesses should forget about hiring expensive PR agencies and just use social media instead. It’s less expensive and more effective, advises Shirley Chan of E-Commerce Faststart.

Chan told WebProNews:

"Small business owners can really take control...[of] all their messaging and their branding, and really just engage their customers in a conversation, without having to hire expensive PR agencies," she says. "I think one of the advantages of being able to be on Facebook and Twitter is you can really actually have this conversation, and cut out the reports and the agencies..."

"You can actually be in the trenches, and be doing real, live, realtime surveys," she points out. "People say, 'do online surveys.' Well you can actually be doing realtime online surveys with your customers, like right now, which is pretty amazing. It cuts the cost down. You can do it yourself or have some people in your company do it."

Chan also says too many business owners get too caught up in immediate monetization and ROI on their social media initiatives.

"I would use social media as a way of doing research - finding out what my customers are talking about - what products do they think are hot in the marketplace, and do I have that? And how can I leverage that hot trend, and make sure that I have it so my customers are speaking...about that product on my site and to their friends, enlisting them to be my soldiers out there, and be my sales force out there on our behalf. I think that's something that's something that small business owners can do and should do."

Read the whole article at http://goo.gl/UAv61

We couldn’t agree more. The TraffikWorks Media suite of tools and services does indeed make it easy to enlist “sales soldiers” from your current customers. Anything posted on the interactive “Wall” of your site also appears on your FaceBook Fan Page, the Facebook status updates of your “fans” (where their friends can see it), your company Twitter timeline and the Twitter timelines of your followers.

So your message will spread quickly. It’s really a new take on an old idea: the power of referral sales. If you’ve ever attended a movie because a friend recommended it, you’ve understood the essence of what TraffikWorks Media does.