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The Chicago Trib did an article yesterday featuring a couple of random small businesses—a cruiseliner, a test preparation site, a real estate company and more—that have used social media to successfully drive their business.

Some highlights/lessons from the article:

Go where your customers are. The Scion Group, which owns and manages college housing, took its blogs to Facebook so they could reach their potential customers where they already play. Find out where your potential clients reside online by asking existing customers what types of social media they use (connecting off and online presences) and seeing where competitors and similar businesses in your field have successful online presences.

Don’t do it halfway! Posting events on social networks, blogging, having a Facebook profile won’t get you a lot of traction unless you have an integrated strategy for what you want to achieve, and actively work toward it every day. For example, PrepMe.com has a targeted, integrated social media presence to reach online clients: words of the day on Twitter, a Facebook crossword game, and Facebook group pages associated with high schools that use its services.

Be transparent. What does that mean? Being open, honest and responsive to online criticism. If someone complains about any aspect of your businesses, being online gives you the opportunity to acknowledge your shortcoming and make it right. Take advantage of that.

Recently, the amount of press on the explosive growth of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter has been overwhelming. What’s been really surprising? The demographic accounting for this massive growth: Baby Boomers are now dominating the social media scene, at least with respect to adoption rate. Facebook, once perceived as a college kid activity when it was restricted to college e-mail addresses, now has women over the age of 55 to thank for its most recent growth, according to Inside Facebook. In the past four months alone, this demographic has grown a staggering 175.3 percent. Additionally, the number of Facebook users over the age of 35 has nearly doubled in the past 60 days.

Similarly and to an even greater degree, Twitter has been the beneficiary from the surge in traffic from the middle-age demographic. Recent research from comScore discovered that 45 to 54 year olds are 36 percent more likely than the average Twitterer’s age to visit the site, which makes them the largest indexing age group. Overall, the average age of all 10 million twitterers is over the age of 35.

What does this mean for businesses? Social media, no longer a playground for the young, has reached a critical mass for use as an effective marketing tool. Coupled with the decline of print media, social media is now on the precipice of assuming its throne as king of reaching the masses. The onus is on businesses to come up with clever ways to effectively utilize these social media tools to bring customers back and reach new potential customers. And that’s where we come in. Let us create or refine your social media strategy and maximize these tools for you.

So many businesses post a happy hour, dinner, or other event on Facebook and expect a magic throng to materialize at their door. But without certain planning, precautions, and promotion on other channels (including in-person and word-of-mouth), your event is bound to bust. Never fear: heed these rules to optimize your Facebook invites.

1. Target the right guest list

If you’re gonna invite all of your fans to a, say, happy hour event, know that the ones who live states away probably aren’t going to attend. Better to target more local friends. Take it a step further—ask and leave comments on your (local) opinion leader friends’ pages—preferably, people who live or work near your businesses—to recruit some more people to the event.

2. Use the right social network

Speaking of location, maybe Facebook isn’t the place to post your happy hour event. Maybe it’s better on a place like a Ning social network for your area. Find a group that engenders a category your business falls into, and start an event there. Or start your own group: “Downtown happy hour fanatics.”

3. Give due time

Not too long of a lead, and not too little. A week and a half is good to do the necessary legwork.

4. Jazz it up

Make a short, funny video about your event. Plant it on your Facebook page and plug and link to it on your ancillary social media outlets (Twitter, Ning, opinion leader blogs on which you comment). Visual media is arresting and instantly explanatory.