Marketing Sherpa’s B2B Marketing  Benchmark Report 2009-10, describes social media as being more “time intensive than capital intensive.” While I find that a big chunk of time is spent on planning and executing social media programs, it’s also as if we’ve been asked to learn a whole new language; social media, a lexicon of the past five plus years, a marketer’s rhetoric.

The time investment requires intensive “following” of blog posts, facebook, twitter, linkedin, youtube, flickr and more. While you can get very caught up in practicing for fluency, every now and then you should come up for air, and take a moment to say thank you.

Thank you’s in “Social Media-ese” can take the form of:

1. Commenting on blog posts you’ve enjoyed
2. Retweeting Twitter Messages
3. Writing on your blog about good posts you’ve read and passing along the link
4. Writing about a new book on social media or marketing report you’ve read and learned from
5. Saving a link to delicious
6. Perhaps the pièce de résistance is the one which often gets neglected—becoming a facebook page fan. Of the five other ways to say thank you, becoming a fan takes the least amount of time, but goes a long way. Check to see if the company has a facebook page, and give them your thumbs-up.

Are there other ways you say thank you in social media?