Brands should join the social media conversation

While social media marketing may prove useful for businesses wishing to drive visitor numbers or sales revenue, brands have also been advised to get involved in conversations around them or their products on social networks.

Jason Falls, a social media consultant and blogger on socialmediaexplorer.com, said this could help brands to find out what people - and particularly their target audience - think about them.

"Because consumers are turning to like-minded people online for recommendations [...] more than ever before, it's not just important but imperative to know what people are saying [...] and interject into those conversations if possible," he added.

And while he noted brands could not control social media conversations, he claimed that they could at least participate and that by not doing so they would be "dead in the water".

Mr Falls advised using services such as Google Alerts, Twitter, Technorati, Bing and Google Blogsearch to search for any conversations involving their brands.

His comments come after the 2009 Survey of Online Consumer Behaviour, conducted by Harris Interactive and commissioned by Tealeaf, found that 13 per cent of people posted negative reviews of companies on a blog or social networking site, double the number that did so in 2008.

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