The attraction of social media for many is the low-cost entry. A few tweets and Facebook posts cost nothing but time. But to garner any sort of return on this time, your social media output needs to be refined and engaging. Its not enough to simply post messages and broadcast your news and products. You need to engage in conversations because its difficult to build up a presence on line without this. Of course, creating a buzz on line demands a commitment to investing the effort involved in cultivating and building a following. So, would you invest time and money in this? Spending hard-won profit on a social media specialist might be expensive but the return might also be well worth the investment. Because you can't do this half-heartedly, it needs a certain level of input, and this means you've got to put out to get in. Here's a great little blog post on social media marketing spending...

Will Facebook lead to the eventual demise of the website? So thinks Stephen Haines of the Social Media behemoth which just keeps getting bigger and mote diverse . As some companies already get more monthly likes on Facebook than hits on their websites, might companies in the future no longer bother having their own website? After all, likes are qualified by several demographic markers, Facebook e-commerce sites can be built into pages, and developer apps let businesses create custom made interactive programs.

So does Facebook look like finishing off the company website? or for that matter, the education VLE, because Facebook for Education could be the answer to a lot of funding and innovation problems. Do we need to spend millions developing intranets like GlowPlus when platforms like this are or will be available.