By Mikal E. Belicove|For Engtrepreneur.com|September 6, 2011

Since Twitter changed the face of communications, business owners have increasingly wondered: If I tweet it, will they come?

In the big screen adaptation of William Patrick Kinsella’s short story, Shoeless Joe, the main protagonist — an Iowa farmer played by Kevin Costner — hears a voice in his head that says, “If you build it, he will come.” While Costner’s character went on to build an iconic baseball field that eventually drew thousands of fictional visitors, you and your business can’t afford to take the same risk. If you build and manage a website, you have to promote it, and according to a new study, adding Twitter’s free ‘Tweet Button’ to your web pages drives traffic to your site and has the potential to lift your sales.

Business websites that include Twitter’s Tweet Button receive seven times the number of social media mentions than sites that don’t display such social sharing hooks, according to a new report from BrightEdge, a San Mateo, Calif.-based enterprise-level search-engine optimization firm, which tallied the responses of four million tweets.

The report says the evidence points to social sharing buttons — like the ‘Tweet’ button at the top of this article — are a means of driving traffic to your website. In its most recent Social-Share Analysis: Tracking Social Adoption and Trends (link opens a PDF file), BrightEdge says 53.6 percent of the largest 10,000 sites on the Web displayed social links or buttons on their homepage in August — a figure that’s up slightly from a 52.8 percent just a month earlier. The company takes the “glass half-empty” approach to these statistics, saying far too many brands…

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