Contacting a person over social media is obviously of limited value. If you get a Tweet from a random business, you're going to ignore it. You know they're sell

Contacting a person over social media is obviously of limited value. If you get a Tweet from a random business, you're going to ignore it. You know they're selling you something, and you have no idea who they are. You're not even sure they're not a spammer. At best, you'll "Like" it or Retweet with the message "this looks cool!". Whatever that's worth. But the message will never leave Twitter, and it will be gone within minutes. This is bad. As Seth Godin points out in "Purple Cow," you want other people to remark about your product. A good blog post might spawn a dozen tweets, but a great Tweet that spawns a dozen blog posts is exceedingly rare. You want to communicate in mediums that encourage others to remark: conferences, tech talks, blog posts, and even aggregators like HN or Reddit. If you see a business mentioned by several of your friends, and on HN, and know company X uses their stuff, you're going to check them out because of your natural curiosity. If you provide good source material, people will go out of their way to mention you elsewhere. After all, there are Karma points at stake! But if you try to form a conversation in a social medium, its as awkward as walking up to the person in real life and announcing, "I'm great! Don't you think so?"