There are two reasons to enter the social media marketing space: to protect your brand and market share and to go out and grab more. How many reasons are there to avoid this marketing venue? None.

The ubiquity of social media means that you have to enter the space. IT manufacturers and resellers are already experimenting with blogs, LinkedIn profiles and Twitter feeds – some have already made them marketing priorities. Their reasons for doing so vary, however.

For the cautious, blogs and other social media tools are defensive. They provide a way to protect the company brand and keep competitors from rushing to claim the high ground online. By maintaining a social media presence, including regular and consistent blog-based communication, they are able to prevent other technology companies from reaching out to their clients. This protective approach doesn’t generate a powerful ROI case it does help prevent revenue from leaking to the competition.

The other approach is value-accretive. Proactive social media marketing provides access to new and broader markets – and the opportunity to seize market share from the competition. It requires a higher investment and greater level of commitment, but the results are far more powerful than those from defensive social media marketing. After all, the objective is growth, and your marketing plan will consist of the tactics most likely to affect this outcome.

What’s most important, though, is that there is no case for avoiding the social media space. Putting off the launch of a blog, waiting to develop a LinkedIn community … this constitutes ceding an advantage to your competitors. You are giving away a competitive advantage, and that always comes with a high cost. It may take you a while to measure the results, but the data will come when it’s too late to make a change.

The question isn’t whether you should be using social media to market your business – it’s how. An integrated approach built on platform-independent content that takes advantage of blogs and other platforms will deliver a consistent message and measurable results.