If you’re an Internet based business such as our web based accounting, then you might already be leveraging your social media networks.

There are plenty out there from Twitter to Facebook, and all of them have different types of scenarios that you should be paying attention to since the audiences are actually somewhat different. For example, if you are leveraging Facebook, there’s a good chance that you’re trying to sell a product or service to friends and acquaintances that you’ve met along the ways. However, microblogging sites such as Twitter provide a different type of scenario where the audience is not only the people that are looking to follow you, but also the real-time stream of information going across like a river. If it passes at just the right time, when someone is looking, you’ll have gained more eyes on your marketing.

Now, there’s multiple reasons to do social media networks, and it truly depends on whether or not your segmented market audience happens to use these services. For us, many of our clients happen to be freelancers of all types and are very in-tune with social networks in general which makes it a great area to not only market to those individuals, but communicate and provide customer relations through those channels. I do not believe that all small businesses should use this as a shotgun blast type marketing since it’s way too broad and is very much dependent to whom you are catering. But if you do provide products and services to an Internet market? Leverage your social networks like there’s no tomorrow.

In this day and age, using the web to accomplish your daily tasks has become the de-facto of many applications and almost the standard for small business building. In fact, my personal experience is that online applications can literally provide a quick and hardened solution at putting together a business in a short amount of time.

Obviously, your usual concerns are there. For instance, offline applications have the single point of it being able to function without an Internet connection. But in this age, who doesn’t have Internet access? Most businesses have at the very least an email address, and it is practically standard that anyone dealing in sales and marketing carries an email-enabled cell phone. The Internet has become so in-tune with our daily lives that you don’t even bat an eyelash when you connect at a coffee shop with WiFi these days while two a decade ago, it would have been laughable for a business to operate out of a coffee shop.

In that case, there really isn’t much of a reason why conducting business primarily only wouldn’t trump an offline application if just for the flexibility of it. Web-based applications are pretty much accessible anywhere, through most browsers, and your data is backed up by the service that you use. What’s not to like? You don’t have to worry about the application crashing, having the latest version, or whether or not the development team even knows you exist. With an online application, you just have to fire up a browser, open an Internet connection and you’re off to the races.