You already know how important social media is, but just to reiterate things, I found an interesting blog post by Jeff Bullas that has more social media statistics than you will ever need.

I found the entire article interesting, but here are some of the highlights for your skimmers.

• Facebook has nearly 850 million monthly active users
• 250 million photos are uploaded to Facebook each day
• 20% of all page views online are Facebook
• 2.7billion “likes” happen every day
• 175 million tweets are sent from Twitter each day
• Twitter gets over 1 million new accounts every day
• Youtube has over 2 billion views per day
• Average Youtube user watches 15 minutes of video daily
• Pinterest has around 12 million monthly unique visitors
• Pinterest is the fastest site in history to reach 10 million visitors

Just to make things clear, you need to be using social media.  It can be your main business strategy if you want it to be, but even if you just run a simple blog you should still set up a simple FB account or at least have “like this” or “+1″ buttons somewhere on your site.

I recommend trying to figure out the most popular social media platforms in your niche and try to be active on those one or two platforms.  For example Pinterest may be more effective for certain markets, while have an active Facebook page may be more effective in another niche.  But you need to be doing something social to succeed online these days.