You’re competing against a billion-dollar company. It’s armed with a $10 million advertising budget and a battalion of marketing professionals. All you’ve got is your little blog.

What an unfair advantage for you.

Online social media tools like blogs, Twitter, podcasts, Facebook and YouTube are the best thing ever to happen to small business. Here are five reasons why you should become familiar with them:

1. They’re Cheap and Easy

These tools are all free. To get started, all you need is a computer and an Internet connection. Heck, Twitter even works on a cell phone. If you’re passionate about your work, it costs you nothing to start telling people about it. Share your expertise and enthusiasm. Just start talking.

Big corporations don’t like to do this. Their lawyers are scared of legal exposure, their executives fret over ROI and their marketers are still throwing money at expensive old media channels that deliver less and less value. Their IT departments cut off access to Facebook and YouTube, most of their employees are prohibited from speaking publicly about the business and it takes a year to add a blog to the company home page. Perhaps this is why more than twice as many Inc. 500 companies use blogs today than Fortune 500 companies, according to researchers at the University of Massachusetts. It’s just so much easier for them to start.

2. Search is the Great Equalizer

It used to be that the company with the most money bought the most awareness, but today that’s all changed. People conduct more than 1 billion Internet searches every day and Google doesn’t care if you’re The New York Times or Joe’s Hardware Store as long as you have the best content. How it determines that is another discussion, but the point is that search engines level the competitive playing field. A small business with great content on its website can compete with a company many times its size.

And here’s a secret for you: Google loves blogs. Blogs are built from the ground up to attract search engines. The more entries you create and the more links you attract, the more Google likes you. Big enterprises are a disadvantage here. Their blogs are often buried deep within their corporate websites. Worse is that the information they publish is often sanitized and stripped of personality. They have a hard time attracting links because, well, they don’t say very much. A smart, quick and passionate small business blogger can run rings around a big competitor.

3. They’re Personal

Think of the companies you really love to do business with. I’m not talking about cereal makers. I’m talking about the dry cleaner, the baker and the guy who fixes your bicycle. Chances are you like these businesses because of the people they employ. You’re happy to patronize them because they make the interaction a pleasure.

Big corporations don’t have personality; they have brand. They’ve spent many years hiding their people from the public in the name of building that brand. That isn’t a bad thing, but it puts them at a disadvantage in leveraging social media. These companies say people are the greatest asset, but when it comes to letting those people speak, they refer inquiries to corporate PR.

As a small business, your brand is you and the people who work with you. Their smiling faces adorn their Facebook profiles and Twitter streams. When they speak, it’s about stuff that matters to them. And guess what? Customers relate better to people than they do to brands.

4. They’re the Fastest Way to Expand Your Geographic Reach

When you start your blog, be sure to install a free analytics tool like StatCounter or Google Analytics. Then look at where your visitors come from. I’ll bet that 90% of them will be from outside of your geographic area and more than a third will come from other countries. The Internet is global and hyperlinks know no geographic bounds. What a great way to expand your market.

Check out the Tinbasher, a cheeky and engaging blog about, of all things, sheet metal. It turns out that the people at Butler Sheet Metal, which publishes the Tinbasher, do some amazing things with sheet metal. They use the blog to tell the world about it. Nearly all of Butler’s new business comes via the Web and its global reach has enabled the company to attract international customers for the first time.

5. They’re Fun

If the whole point of social media still eludes you, I guarantee your attitude will change the first time you receive a comment or e-mail from someone you’ve never met talking about something you’ve said. Social media is a great way to expand your network of relationships, and relationships lead to business. It’s also a thrill to find out that your expertise and opinions matter to someone else. As your network grows, you’ll engage in conversations that will broaden your perspective, give you new ideas and make new friends. What could be more fun than that?

Paul Gillin is a writer, speaker and online marketing consultant. He specializes in social media and the application of personal publishing to brand awareness and business marketing. His award-winning book, The New Influencers, was published in 2007 and his latest book, Secrets of Social Media Marketing, was published in the fall of 2008. His website is gillin.com and he blogs at paulgillin.com