Regardless of how much you use social media to promote your brand or to communicate with anyone, email is arguably the most direct online method of messaging someone.
Analogy time: Put yourself back in 1994. You would like to converse with your friend Brenda, who lives down the street. You could:
Today, as impersonal as communication can be, directly emailing someone usually takes more effort than a tweet or quick text message. Social media is at best likened to Choice B (with Twitter DMs) or C (with a Facebook Poke, at worst). In the realm of rapid global online communication, a personal email is analogous to Choice A. While tweeting or posting a Facebook or LinkedIn status is quick, easy, and instantly available to hoards of people, email remains more intimate (caveat: namely when emailing a single person, not forwarding messages to groups).
With this in mind, consider how many emails you send each day. Your signature can serve as another promotion tool. While cute quotes and swirly fonts may be appropriate for people looking to personalize email to friends and family, business-related emails can be a powerful method to unobtrusively promote your web presence. I.e., instead of blatantly linking someone to your blog or Twitter page, a small icon at the end of your signature is less abrasive and serves the same purpose. Readers will appreciate how optional and undirected clicking said icon seems: As far as email etiquette goes, you could manually insert links like this: “P.S. Check out my blog here! And follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn and Facebook here, here, and here…” or you could use WiseStamp, with customizable signatures insertable anywhere in the email.
As Robin Good writes in his blog post on Social Media vs. Email, “My proposition is to look with new and open eyes at the marketing potential that email could offer, as blinded by negative past experiences and models and distracted by the huge momentum that social media is having, we may just be overlooking what is right away, simple, powerful and effective, if only utilized in a more appropriate way.”
Takeaway point: Social media is powerful, but aim to brand yourself with a well-rounded toolbox- use a customized email signature, because Brenda might ignore your page but she has to answer the door.
is a social media enthusiast, marketer, part-time web developer, and Etsy baker 
living in Atlanta, GA. She hails from the Midwest and loves chess and rollerblading.
@emilybinder:
@adoreajarbakery:
