This is the first installment of our 12 days of social media. Each day, until December 24, enjoy a social media tip that will help grow your brand in the new year.

The beauty of leveraging the benefits of social media is that the tools already exist. Instead of building from scratch—and wasting budget and resources—partner with the third-party tools and communities where your target audience and demographic already spend their time. 

If you’re looking to create and harbour a community, create a fan page on Facebook. If you want to display video, why not upload to YouTube or Vimeo and embed the clip on your own site? Need a quick newsbite that you can update and keep fresh? Maybe incorporating a Twitter feed into your layout is an easy solution. Hoping to display your publications in a beautiful, easily readable way? Issuu can help you present PDFs in stylized, flippable magazines, as well as organize and order your issues on a virtual shelf, not to mention enter your publications into a searchable library combed over by all its users. A company blog can easily be integrated into your website using such popular blogging tools as WordPress, Typepad, and Blogger with minor tweaking on your end, rather than pouring resources into building blog functionality of your own.

Instead of recreating what’s already there, use what exists—not only have you saved time, but you’ve also added your content and brand into the social sphere, and wasn’t that the point anyway?

Collaboration is a huge part of what we do. And creative minds don't always think alike. But that's what keeps things interesting around here. This post was written in cooperation by members of the Trampoline Branding staff.