Is your business using social media sites like Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn as promotional tools? If you aren’t, then you are behind the times. Leading analyst firm Access Markets International Partners recently published research which shows that roughly 70 percent of all small and medium sized businesses have made social media activities a key component of their marketing.

But it takes more than setting up a social media account to help move your business forward. As with any other marketing tool, companies succeed when they use social media tactically to increase their exposure to potential customers and clients.

There are many reasons why your business should consider integrating social media tools as a major part of its marketing and promotion. Here are 10 of the most compelling:

1-    Find New Customers Through a Company Profile: It’s critical to post regularly if you want to increase your followers or fans and convert them to potential leads. A company profile is an ideal opportunity for you to post important news and trends in your industry along with the latest company news. This catches the attention of new customers interested in your industry and enhances your reputation as an expert.

2-    Find New Customers Through Friends: Your personal social media accounts can also serve as potential avenues to promote your business. Posting regular updates relating to your business and activities reminds friends about your company and spurs them to either use your services or refer one of their friends.

3-    Generate Site Traffic: Posting regularly on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn with updates that link back to your site creates additional traffic for your site. Social media bookmarking tools like Digg, Stumbleupon and Slashdot can also generate additional traffic to your site if you create frequent articles and blog posts.

4-    Brand Recognition: Social media outreach gives your company a chance to gain exposure with the highest number of potential customers and clients. Studies have shown that it takes a potential customer hearing a company’s name at least seven times before they gain the trust and respect needed to earn their business, highlighting the importance for a company getting their name out there.

5-    Brand Monitoring: Having a social media presence allows you to better understand what current and potential customers are saying about your product or services. Through active social media monitoring, you have the opportunity to address negative comments and correct false or inaccurate information about your brand.

6-    More Search Engine Listings: Search engines are increasingly giving weight to social media profiles in their rankings. Using brand names and keywords in your profiles can help you to generate traffic for your social media sites and company homepage.

7-    Integrated Social Media Results in Search Engines: Search engines like Google and Microsoft Bing are increasingly interested in indexing and ranking posts and other information from social media sites. Along with social media posts, content from popular video sites like YouTube can also be optimized for indexing by the major search engines.

8-    Niche Marketing: Social media allows you to reach very specific subsets of individuals based on their personal preferences and interests. Creating social media strategies based on the individual interests of specific audiences (including developing unique social media profiles targeted at certain subsections of your audience) is a powerful tool.

9-    Links for SEO: While many social media bookmarking sites use NOFOLLOW tags that limit the outbound link value of posts made on their sites, some major sites like Slashdot, Digg, Furl, Mixx and FriendFeed still allow DOFOLLOW tags. You can still see benefits from posting to social media bookmarking sites that use NOFOLLOW tags if people read your posts and link back to your Website.

10-    Stay Ahead of Competition: Your target audience is becoming savvier when it comes to the using social media sites in their daily lives. If you want to appear relevant and in-step with the latest advances in technology, your potential customers will want to see you on these sites as well. Your savvy customers may prefer to use you than your competition, if they can find or communicate with you on the social media sites, when your competition is not there.