The most popular are by far Facebook and Twitter, to give an idea of the importance of Facebook they recently announced they have bypassed the 350 million user mark and independent data shows they bypassed Google for a short time in December for the most visitors. This means your customers are there, you should be too.

The value in social networking really comes from friends recommending products, services, or websites to their friends or family. This type of recommendation can be very valuable. How do you take advantage of this?

In the case of Facebook it could be the use of a fan page which you can promote and get people to “fan” you, then when you update your fan page it will show up in your fans accounts which means their friends could see it as well. This is a vote of trust and can be very useful.

This also means that you can put links to your website in the post you put on Facebook, this can be used to drive traffic to your website to get awareness to a promotion or other special event.

It is important though to make sure you have the opposite happening as well, you need to make sure that on your small business website you have links to your social media sites. This allows people that normally go to your website to find your Facebook or Twitter account easily and follow you, this means when you do updates there these users will automatically see them and be driven back to your online presence.

It is also important when you are promoting your Facebook or Twitter page that you attempt to find people local to your business, if you can have them follow you they are very targeted users in your geographic location, the best for customer conversions. Look for a follow up article on this in the near future.

Accounts are free, very easy to use, and a great way to connect with customers. If you need help contact Localtek for more info on small business marketing in the online world.

Many of us could see things like coming but many people continue to focus strictly on website SEO rather than how they will implement their social media optimization. With local trends it gets even more important to think about how you will combine locally targeted search with real time SEO.

By watching trends and acting in real time on a local level the targeting is more focused since the “heat of the moment” is on and you know in real time what people are looking for and WHERE they are looking for it at.

I remember testing location based services when I was in a product house at Lucent Technologies (Bell Labs) around 2001 or so, it is amazing to see how far things have come. We could see where things were headed then but the the move to social media was not foreseen.

It is amazing how even very non-tech focused people are moving easily into services that  a few years back they would of considered too geeky or complicated.

Why? Because with local and trusted peer relationships on social networks they feel comfortable because all their friends are there….

In summary, we know  these trends will not always be based on search terms that are business focused but creative ways to take advantage of this tool will come to light, I look forward to seeing them.

For more info check out Mashable.