customers, employees and friends can surf to.

Consider The Tallest Poppy as a case study. The downtown Winnipeg restaurant has a Facebook group with more than 425 members. Through this group, owner Talia Syrie has been able to promote events such as a recent Mother’s Day brunch, host reviews of their food and announce special promotions such as barbecue Fridays.

Syrie was inspired to start using Facebook as a marketing tool after seeing that other companies were doing so.

“I saw that other businesses had Facebook groups and thought we should have one,” Syrie says She set up the group function after she had already created a profile for The Tallest Poppy, to get in touch with a group for a dinner party.

“People seem to be checking Facebook more than they answer their phone and certainly more than they check their voicemail messages, Syrie says, so it seemed like a more effective way to invite people to do things.”

Syrie, however, soon found one of the pitfalls of being a business owner creating an account in their operation’s name: Facebook limits its users to one account, and with a personal profile already attributed to her, The Tallest Poppy was removed.

In the end though, the move proved to be beneficial for Syrie and her business. The group has attracted more users, and, with her restaurant having a constantly changing menu, she is now able to send group members updates, while also having space for customer recommendations on the group’s “wall.” Syrie has also used paid advertisements on the popular social networking site, which allows companies to target their spots by demographics such as age, location and relationship status.

It is this type of small business that Sherri Garrity believes can benefit most from social networking tools. Garrity, chief corporate fugitive of Corporate Fugitives, herself an avid user of online networking tools, sees that many aren’t recognizing the potential these tools have to increase recognition, something that can be hard with minimal (human) resources.

“The opportunities are so much more than I think they realize, because what I see in that market, especially people that are coming from a corporate background or where this is a second career, is that they tend to think of social media tools as something that younger people use and don’t think of it as a business tool; but it is growing and it’s a really hot topic,” she says.

So if it’s well established that these mechanisms are important for business today, why doesn’t every company have a Twitter account or a blog? The answer, according to Rob Warren, executive director of the Asper Centre for Entrepreneurship at the University of Manitoba, lies in part in the technological aspects. Even in cases where the expected generational usage is higher, functionality is not being maximized.

“I think you’re finding that the people who have a younger management team are using those,” Warren comments, but adds that, “for the most part, they’re not getting the most they could out of those particular pieces.”

Warren, who himself uses Twitter and LinkedIn frequently, suggests that much like companies did in the 1990s by bringing in a web expert, businesses today should invest in people familiar with online marketing opportunities.

“You should hire somebody who understands how these things are used,” Warren explains. “Those original websites were informational, but not practical. What you want to do is get to the point where you can start using a blog or Twitter and fit that into a broader-based viral marketing strategy. They really need to understand that.”

Part of this understanding is identifying which are the right programs to use and how to best enable them for your intended use. The online social-networking world, after all, is not just composed of Facebook; in fact, as Warren points out, many industries have their own social networking websites (such as biomedexperts.com or doctorshangout.com). However, the reality is that Facebook is, by far, the most populated social network, having recently overtaken MySpace. In the U.S., according to PC Magazine’s website, Facebook received more hits than its older, NewsCorp-owned competitor in May 2009 for the first time, while its international unique visitor totaled roughly 307 million visits, compared to MySpace’s approximately 123 million views.

One of the key assets Facebook has is its level of accessibility. An individual or company can set its security parameters, so that it can be entirely searched and viewed or can be completely hidden to the public eye. Knowing these facets and using them to your business’s advantage will help your organization to unlock the full potential of what Facebook has to offer. Ultimately, there may not be a correct answer as to which web tools to use. Any function, when used properly, can be beneficial; but just as most marketing plans have a multi-pronged approach, so too, should a company use different mechanisms for their electronic promotion, but still tie it back to that boom tool from the late 1990s.

“The top ones for businesses are really Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Each one of them really has a different flavour and tends to be used for different purposes,” Garrity says, adding that, “you want to have a website to point them to, because it is online–you want to capitalize on that.”