Admittedly, I am a relative novice when it comes to social media. Granted, I have been active with LinkedIn for a while, and I have built up a respectable network there.
And quite honestly, I still learn new features about LinkedIn each day. I only recently learned that you can feed your blog to your LinkedIn profile, providing more exposure (and referrals). But, I am quite new to tools such as Twitter and Facebook. I have heard and read about them for quite a while now, but just didn’t think I had the time to spend on them. Fool was I. 
I had a few clients recently ask about those tools, and since I wasn’t too familiar with them, the only way to learn was to dive in and find out for myself. Granted, my length of experience with both tools is almost a week old, but I can already see the benefits. Just for example, my blog has tracking tools to see where my traffic is coming from. Over the last few days, a majority of referrals came from Facebook.
And I don’t even have a very large network of “friends” yet. You can bet that I will work to grow that network, and fast. And a neat trick I learned was that I can feed my Twitter updates into my Facebook page, enabling each tool to work with the other, and altogether strengthening the benefits. The only problem I see is the addictiveness of these tools, and if you are not careful, you can spend a lot of time on them. And while social networking might not be for everyone, or even a good idea for your particular business, I have yet to find a downside. Good luck!
Todd Schnick. Be Intrepid. www.intrepid-llc.com