It’s been said before, but it bears saying again. Conversations are what social marketing is all about. Twice this week I’ve been asked about using Twitter and Facebook for driving conversions in one form or another. In one case, the goal was registrations for participating in a non-profit organization. Another came from a B2B marketer looking for leads. The basic idea being proposed was the same — to use social media as a distribution channel for promotion.

Not that this is a strange notion. The low threshold of the follow-back or the friend confirmation as permission to communicate lends these tools to shameless self promotion. (Fortunately tools like Tweetdeck help us all sift through the noise.) In my case, I’m guessing the rationale behind the questions was pretty much traditional demand generation. It goes something like this: “If I get my message to 100 people, one of them will be interested. So, if Twitter and Facebook can help me identify a couple thousand likely prospects, I’ll get a couple dozen leads by posting messages about my product.”

The problem is that while social media can serve as a low cost broadcast channel, the real marketing power in these tools is that they provide an exceptional way to spread (or socialize) and refine information or great ideas. The broadcast part of social media is great, and you might even get your 1% the first time out of the box. But, if the focus of your posts are primarily to get recipients to do something for you (e.g., register on your website), email is probably a better tool. At least there, your legacy of distributing promotional offers is hidden within the email inboxes of your unwary and probably unwilling audience.

Social media gives marketing the ability to reach not only those pre-disposed to your product or cause, but also those casually aware or wholly unaware your product exists. Those people are not “shopping” and might not even recognize the need. But, if your ideas are interesting and appealing to a broad enough cross-section, chances are you can use social media to engage in conversation with like-minded people, and your ideas might have a chance at getting passed along to a much broader network than your own.

Especially in the B2B world, it’s the rare product or cause that meets this requirement of appealing to the masses , so rather than using social media as a broadcast channel consider using it as a way to talk to people with whom you might not ordinarily have a chance interact. If you practice doing this and gauge your skill at how many substantial conversations you are having or how many times your ideas have been passed along, you’ll be on your way to effectively incorporating social media into your marketing mix. When you do, most likely you’ll get your 1% and then some.