While there is no answer that will meet all needs, social media continues to astound companies and clients with its effectiveness and impact. If you are a small-business owner, you can’t afford to ignore the value and power that social media can provide your company.

Skeptics may look down their noses at social media and relegate it to personal and trivial uses. But the reality is many companies are successfully leveraging it as a way to better engage with clients, enhance the brand, recruit new employees, and develop new products.

In this new world of transparency and accountability – and thanks to this ever-changing technology – forward-thinking companies are also connecting to their customers in an intensely personal way.

If you want to embrace and leverage this technology, build a baseline social media brand identity for your company. At a bare minimum, establish a presence on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.  In this way you will start the connection to your clients in the three largest social media tools in use today. This also extends to the brands and companies that your clients value.

Here’s a breakdown of the big three and why you should use them:

Twitter: A micro-blogging tool that allows the user to send status updates of 140 characters at a time. While some call this the legerdemain of the short-attention-span crowd, small businesses should “tweet” interesting articles and factoids about their companies. It’s a great tool to establish a voice for your company by keeping a running dialogue going. Think of this as a continuous conversation you hold with all of your customers at once.

Facebook: A meeting place for all your friends, family and coworkers, Facebook is used by more people than any other social media tool, and it is starting to replace other communication technologies such as e-mail and blogs. The primary update feature of this tool is a status update message where you can post pictures, text, video and links. Your updates show up in the news feed of each user, not unlike Twitter, but people can react and post their comments to your information in a more visible way.

LinkedIn: A lot of people view this as the business version of Facebook, as people tend to show their personal side on Facebook and their career side on LinkedIn. Think of LinkedIn as the virtual storefront of your brand, whether it is you as an individual, or for your company. In fact, you need to have multiple personalities when it comes to this social media tool in that you need a personal profile set up as well as one for your business. As you add employees, they will list your company as part of their employment history on their profile, and thereby link their brand to yours.

How to leverage

Once you have your bare minimum presence established on the big three social media tools, you can use them as leading and lagging measures of your company’s brand performance as well as a tool to communicate the things you think are important. Here are the top five ways you can leverage them to benefit your company immediately:

Extend your reach. Revise your traditional marketing and communication plans to include these social media channels. Use them to post news releases, company updates, product reviews and development information.

You may find it useful to create a “role and intent” strategic document for your company that outlines how each of the social media channels will be used, and what type of content will be published.

For instance, you may use Twitter to provide three or four updates a day on the development of a new product. By doing so, you help generate interest and excitement for your product, while collecting real time feedback and suggestions on how to improve it.

Recruit new employees. Your future employees are already researching you via social media tools, so besides pushing your own content through them, you should be monitoring any comments people are saying about your company as well.

Candidates will review who is working and has worked at your company on LinkedIn and will be looking for recommendations and comments that will give them a sense of your company’s work ethic and culture. They will review the discussions posted on your Facebook fan page and will look for trends about your company on Twitter.

Enhance customers’ experience. Facebook business pages are a great way for your company to publish content such as press releases, photos of events, start discussions on products, and offer customer service options.

By letting your customers list themselves as fans of your company on Facebook, it provides you viral marketing help by leveraging the best type of relationship sales possible.

Twitter allows you to run contests, share insider information and provide tips and tricks of your products, while letting your fans “retweet” your postings to share with their friends.

Track your competition. Just as you are sharing your brand and company to the world, so too will your competitors. This provides you excellent performance metrics to see how you are doing in maintaining or enhancing your market share. Furthermore, you can assess in real time how your customers perceive you and your competition. This will allow you to make changes on the fly.

Express yourself. It is expected that your company has a voice and is expressing itself through social media. Strong brands articulate their values, goals and offerings – both real and perceived. Blogging and micro-blogging (through the status updates of the big three) provide you the venue to constantly share your company’s story, brand promise and value to the world.

While there is a lot of discussion on the Web and in the press around social media and how to use it, there is no magic formula for the use of social media, and no prescription other than this: Participate!

Social media is a contact sport, and you have to play with it to learn and leverage it. Every day sees a new use or trend to help spur a company or individual to new levels of social media savviness. While you may make mistakes along the way, your customers are apt to forgive if you correct quickly. As long as you engage social media in a genuine and direct way, you will be rewarded with great conversations and connections that have never been available before.