If you’re not using social media to promote your business, you’re missing out.

A recent study by Wetpaint and the Altimeter Group, called the ENGAGEMENTdb study, ranks the “world’s most valuable brands based on how they leverage social media to interact with customers.” Able to measure and monitor brand engagement, ENGAGEMENTdb is the first of its kind. Essentially, Wetpaint and Altimeter Group are measuring social media’s financial value. For example, how does a Twitter account actually pay off — or does it even pay off at all?

So the study took the world’s 100 most valuable brands (as measured by BusinessWeek/Interbrand “Best Global Brands 2008″ rankings) and looked at their social media use — how well the brands are engaging their consumers and how that affects their revenue and profit. What the study found was that those 100 brands are “experiencing a direct correlation between top financial performance and deep social media engagement.”

What exactly does that mean? Simply put, companies engaging in social media are more financially successful.

At Get Page One, we’re firm believers in the power of social media marketing. But you can’t just sign up for accounts on Twitter, Facebook, etc. and hope for it to pay off. You have to work hard at it and be consistent in the way you use it — you can’t just sign up and leave. Successful social media marketing involves signing up for social media accounts and actually being social — interacting with other users, regularly updating and participating.

Engage in social media, be consistent and see it literally pay off.

April Fool’s Days of the past were all about classic pranks, like gluing a quarter to the ground on a busy street corner.

But April Fool’s Day seems to have become less about physical gags and more about Internet gags. It can be  pretty easy to pull off a prank online — especially since so many of us spend about every waking moment in front of a computer. Plus, pulling a prank online means you could get a ton of people at once to fall for your trick. For example, tweeting something like, “CRAZY video of me meeting Kanye West last night!” with a link to this video. Hilarious, I know. Feel free to use that one next year.

So what about company websites that take today to let loose and show everybody their wacky, fun side? Maybe you read about Google’s CADIE today, or maybe you excitedly clicked on the ad for the $99 pink leather Eames lounger in today’s Apartment Therapy email.

There’s also the extremely well-done (and daring!) Whole Foods homepage, which features a prominent ad for Organic Air that costs $6.99 for .02 oz (get it?), along with a bunch of recipes for dishes like Deep-Fried Pork Eclairs, Arugula Compost Surprise and… Toast. Mmmm.

The question is, if you’ve seen something April Foolsy today on a business’ website, how’d you find it? I’m willing to bet one or more of these things happened:

• You saw the link on your Twitter feed
• You saw the link on your Facebook feed
• Someone IMed/G-chatted it to you
• You saw the link on one of your favorite blogs (this one, obviously)
• A co-worker mentioned it during a lighthearted conversation at the watercooler

Next question: Did you tell someone about what you saw? Of course you did. That’s exactly what they wanted you to do. The April Fool’s Day joke was all about social media marketing, and by it getting passed from person to person via Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc., it was successful.

What’s more is that successful viral marketing like this means lots of inbound links to your website. That’s excellent for search engine optimization.

Maybe we won’t see as many classic pranks on future April Fool’s Days, but let me drop a pretty intense analogy on you here: By pulling off a well-done joke on a company website like Google.com or WholeFoodsMarket.com, isn’t that just the modern-day version of gluing a quarter to the ground on a busy street corner? People who first notice that quarter will pause to look closer, some bending down to try to grab it, which causes passersby to look and see what all the fuss is about. No matter what, everyone walks away knowing that there is a quarter glued to the ground.

(Whoa.)

By now, you’ve likely heard at least something about Twitter, the social networking website where users can “tweet” 140 characters at a time. People use Twitter for all kinds of stuff — keeping in touch with friends, finding out what’s going on at a particular place, joining conversations and, most important to this blog post, marketing.

How does a website where people seem to just be writing about everyday personal things — “What a beautiful day!” “Just saw a superlative movie!” “I’m eating food at a restaurant!” — have the potential to be a marketing platform? you may wonder.

Look closely at Twitter. Spend some time looking around at what people are saying, or, even better, type in a keyword at search.twitter.com. When you do that, you’ll start to notice something: Twitter has a ton of potential when it comes to marketing your business.

And businesses are no stranger to using Twitter as a marketing platform. Just look at Skittles — for one day a couple of weeks ago, going to Skittles.com brought up a search for “#skittles” on search.twitter.com, so any time a Twitter user mentioned Skittles, it’d show up in the search feed. Needless to say, a few jokers took the opportunity to write inappropriate remarks about the brand, but for the most part the chatter was positive. Skittles got exactly what they wanted: for people to talk about Skittles! And, hey, that’s exactly what we’re doing right now, so it clearly worked.

Countless other companies are already on Twitter, as they’ve quickly realized its social media marketing potential. Companies like Whole Foods, General Motors, Comcast and JetBlue use Twitter to actually interact with their customers, and they even provide customer service through it. That’s a brilliant way to use Twitter, since it seems customers truly appreciate when a human from a business actually takes the time to speak to them. A personal reply online seems so little and basic, but imagine how well this kind of customer service resonates with people.

It’s incredibly easy to make Twitter one-way and just send out self-promotional tweets, a mistake that countless businesses are making right now. Doing it that way is not only lazy, it’s a missed opportunity. Making it two-way (where you are actively replying to other users and engaging in conversation) is exactly how Twitter is meant to be used. Interaction is essential if you’re going to effectively use Twitter as a marketing platform.