According to a recent study by Network Solutions and the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business, while twice as many small employers (100 or fewer workers) report using social media to meet their business goals now vs. a year ago, the share of those that use it is still only one out of four.

While the biggest reason for why the majority of small business leaders are holding back in embracing this technology is costs, I think a close second is that the marketplace of social media sites and tools is so crowded, and getting more so every day.  So many leaders are understandably asking, How do I start?

Fortunately, Lisa Barone, Co-Founder of social media services provider Outspoken Media, has a new post on Small Business Trends that outlines effective action steps for starting down this path.  These include:

• Create a plan
• Own your name
• Set up your microhouses
• Enable social sharing
• Create rules for engagement
• Engage
• Set up a process to watch the action

Read Lisa's full post to see what's involved under each of these steps.

Getting ROI from Twitter

One of the leading social media sites is Twitter.  If you're not familiar, Twitter is a micro-blogging platform where, as a company, you can communicate directly with your customers and build an engaged fan base among them.  Think of it as another marketing platform.  Many companies have succeeded, leveraging employee engagement, by tasking key people to create their own Twitter accounts and posting (or tweeting) about both company initiatives and customer success stories.

But while tweeting is easy, measuring ROI from it is difficult.  I reached out to Lisa via email to get some insight into how best to do this, and she shared with me a tool called Retweet Rank.  Using this as a jumping-off point, I've put together a list of action steps as part of a strategy to measure how much impact your tweets are having.  Check it out:

1. First, you need to put your company on Twitter if it's not already.  It's free to do; you can get going quickly by visiting Twitter.
2. Next, you need to have a blog feed going.  Follow step 1 in this post to set it up if you don't already have one.
3. Back on Twitter, start tweeting!  Lisa wrote another post on SBT earlier this year on how businesses can best tweet.
4. Once you've been tweeting for a while, it's time to measure how how much they've been shared – or retweeted in Twitter vernacular.  Go to Retweet Rank and enter your Twitter username in the large field at the top of the page.
5. On the search page that appears, don't worry about the info on your retweet rank; just look for the "RSS" link to the right of where it says "Recent retweets."  Click it.
6. Copy the link from the new window that pops up in your browser and paste it as a new subscription in your blog feed reader.  The quick steps to do this are listed here.
7. Now you're going to see a new blog in your blog feed that starts with "RT @[your Twitter name]".  You're done!  Now any time a customer or anyone else shares your tweets (retweets), you'll have a running tally of them in your blog feed.

Related: This post discusses how workplace team building and other people practices factor into more and better dialogues with consumers.