Marketing and Social Media

Marketing through social media seems a bit pointless to me -- I'd much rather be social in person than online -- but, since I'm not a Facebook fan, I guess that's probably why (but that's a whole other story).

And, I can't see the value of 140 word sound bites coming at you from all these sources -- sounds like word clutter.  (An interesting book I'm reading is "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains" by Nicholas Carr.)

However, with 40 million people on Facebook (or is it more now?), I'm probably in the minority -- and obviously, a lot of people like Twitter. So, from a marketing perspective, would a small company be better off spending a bit of regular time on Facebook/Twitter than to spend the money on keeping a website updated?

Here's a brief summary of different social media and their pro's and con's from Constant Contact:
http://www.constantcontact.com/social-media-for-small-business/index.jsp


I think to be effective at Twitter and Facebook, you do have to have updates more often than a website -- and Twitter's format almost requires at least a 3x/week posting from a business otherwise I think it looks like it was just done for marketing purposes instead of giving helpful info to followers (similar to a 3 year old website with no changes). 

 Here's (in my opinion) someone who's handling facebook and twitter very effectively for a small business (she's an acupuncturist) -- HOWEVER, she's doing a daily sentence or two on Facebook and sending it to twitter.

The pro's on facebook and twitter is she's not spending a lot of time doing it, however, she is doing it daily (a morning ritual?).  The blog then can be more in-depth but it doesn't have to be as regular -- looks like every 3 weeks or so.

Her facebook page:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Novato-CA/Heart-to-Heart-Medical-Center/73206361399

Her twitter page:
http://twitter.com/DrShiroko

And her website and blog (she updates the blog every 2 or 3 weeks:
http://www.hthmc.com/blog/

Things to think about...  the world is a changin'!