Facebook and Twitter not rocket science

Just stop and think to yourself a minute, how many times in the last month have you seen something similar to this:

'Increase sales 100% using Facebook and Twitter!'

Which, translated into reality actually means:

'pay us lots of money and we'll tell you blindingly obvious facts that you probably already know!'

Facebook and Twitter are not rocket science. They've been built up as this big barrier that companies have to engage with or face a slow, painful death, and I'm always hearing of million pound campaigns trying to exploit the platform, almost on a daily basis. I'm not claiming to be an expert here, in fact, far from it. I'd still like to use both sites to greater benefit for this blog but the fact is, Facebook and Twitter work because it's an easy place for people to highlight what they want.

In the same way that picking up the phone and asking a customer what they need is useful. If you want to be really 1980's about write the customer a letter asking the very same thing. There is no hidden science behind the social networks, they're just simple ways to interact with customers and gage their needs. If you're good with conversation then you can probably master the social networking world, so my advice would be to not throw lots of money at someone who'll most likely tell you exactly the same thing.