Which social networks should you use to build your business?

PCWorld has a good article out entitled “Build Business Using Social Networks.” It mentions a few of the most famous success stories and trends in social marketing: Comcast using Twitter for customer service, companies investing time and resources in maintaining Facebook fan pages, and brands increasingly taking advantage of Facebook’s News Feed in order to disseminate marketing messages virally.

Given that so much was written on the business value of social networks last year, one might think that popular media and the blogosphere have exhausted the topic. One might contend that all of the marketing best practices here are by now well-known and widely used. We don’t think this is the case, though. In fact, there are probably a fair number of generalities and misconceptions on record that call for clarification if not total refutation. (To its own credit, the PCWorld article is pretty much spot-on in its main points.)

Case in point: Some marketers believe that social networks each have their unique and strictly defined business value. Advertise on LinkedIn if you just want to reach professionals. Launch campaigns on MySpace if you want to reach high schoolers. Build your brand on Facebook, but only if you’re reaching out to the college crowd.

A number of studies and surveys have already showed how the characterizations above are wrong. By themselves, these social networks’ aggregate and average user-base profiles provide a strong enough refutation. In addition, though, we might marshal some illustrative anecdotes in order to describe the social networking world more accurately.

Last year, we were excited to help Serena Software (an enterprise solutions provider to 96 of the Fortune 100) wage a high-impact B2B marketing campaign on Facebook. Leaning on some sharp video content, Serena was able to drive more than 8,000 business-oriented folks to one of their microsites.

Of course, Serena’s just one industry example of many. Ultimately, this is all to say that social networks are more and more becoming great tools for reaching and engaging all types of audiences — and this includes those people (consumers, colleagues, etc.) who care in one way or another about your brand or core business.

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