[ebbv]

I won't speak to what's right for anyone else's company but I will talk about where I work;

We engage in social media because our business is a service business. Our customers are paying us every month to continue to serve them. It's therefore important to stay in communication with them and stay engaged with them.

We don't see social media as a major traffic source, let alone sales source, but it is useful for engaging our current customers and communicating with them.

We do also use it as an opportunity to spread the word about ourselves and have more presence but we don't expect, and don't see it as a major source of traffic or sales. That's ok because the purpose of those pages is not to be a sales source.

I think if the point of this article is; don't sink tons of money into social media expecting an immediate boost in sales, I'd say that's a solid point.

But if the point of this article is abandon all social media ye who enter here, that's probably silly. It's not that hard to keep up a Facebook page, Twitter account and even Google+ page.

[bhanks]

Yeah I think the point is that if you are using it as a sales channel then you should measure it closely because it probably isn't doing as well as you think. Social media is just an extension of customer support in its most effective use case. You can see Lucidchart responds to customer questions via twitter for example.