The combination of a blog and a Twitter account is one of the easiest ways for people to dominate the field of opinion available online. Blogs allow people to express basically any thought they want, and Twitter allows them to get those thoughts out to a wider audience. The marriage of the two makes perfect sense. The ease with which the two forces can be combined is what makes the pairing so effective. You can do this on your own, or you can take your efforts to the next level and bring a professional SMM into the fold to do it for you and aim for maximum returns.

Let us examine a recent real life incident of how a blog and Twitter account can be a powerful duo. A regular person with a small blog was dissatisfied with service at a Dunkin’ Donuts store in Norcross Georgia. She blogged about the incident that got her up in arms and tweeted it out – to less than a couple hundred followers no less.  Within a matter of hours, the blog was appearing on every social media outlet. Hundreds of hits per hour started piling in. Then it was picked up by local e-zines and news and re-tweeted over and over again. Dunkin Donuts corporate contacted the person and the problem was handled. But the initial post went on and on drawing traffic for days. Even months later, it still generated traffic and ranked for the relevant keywords for that location.

If a relative amateur can do that, imagin

e what a professional can do. For a business, a social media manager can create much the same buzz – not every time, but more often than you would think. They make this happen by knowing how to work with social media platforms, investing the time to build a presence for their client on each one that is relevant to their business, and they already have their own established presence. These are all important factors that help take clients to the next level – and they are not skills everyone has. They understand how to package your product, in this case your posts, and disseminate them in the most effective manner that carries the best possibility for creating a chain reaction of visits and hopefully conversions for your site. This is what their strength is.

Businesses can do this without bringing in a professional, but it does come at a cost. The opportunity cost is that they may oftentimes need to dedicate a single person to building a competent social networking presence full-time for the better part of a month or more. This isn’t a part-time job you pawn off on your interns. Social networking is not just a matter of opening accounts and posting material, it is about connecting with other people and businesses and scratching their back early on so they will do the same for you later. It is about knowing where to find those people, how to ally with them in this digital commune and how to get your message out in a manner that people not only want to receive it, they want to share it. That is what an SMM does and why it is better to hire one than try it on your own. It is an investment, but when properly run it provides immense returns.