There are two very different ways you can look at the role that social media plays for your business. One angle shows you how you can use Facebook, Twitter, and other services to reach your customers. The other describes how your customers can use those services to reach you.

Both of these considerations are equally important, and together they indicate how invaluable social media is for many modern businesses. It represents direct marketing that allows you to speak directly to your customers about what is most important to their experience of your brand at any given moment. At the same time, it provides a source of in-the-moment market research, so you know what that experience is like and what the consumer is saying about your brand.

It’s a good idea for you, the business owner to make both of these things part of your social media strategy, and this should influence your decision-making when you talk to local social media companies. They are not all created equal, and while one Los Angeles social media company might be great at producing creative tweets and informative Facebook updates, another might go beyond these roles and put equivalent focus on using social media to analyze the consumer landscape.

The latter strategy is much more likely to result in appropriate targeting of your social media outreach, as well as anticipation of potential problems. That is the strategy you want, and there should be little doubt about how it can help your business.