Creating a fan page on Facebook is relatively simple and it’s easy to copy and paste a web address onto the page for visitors to click on. People who are fans of your website can “like” it on Facebook and encourage other friends to like the service as well. Since people spend over 500 billion minutes per month on Facebook, it’s a pretty easy way to get people to view your site and interact with your visitors by announcing news or promotions.

Twitter is another social media network that is gaining prominence on the web. Twitter simply allows users to post “tweets” to other users who are following them about news, activities, pictures, and other information (or in Lindsay Lohan’s case, too much information). An ever popular website with celebrities and news media alike, Twitter is an informal way for you to interact with people who utilize your website in 130 characters or less. It also a great way to promote news on your website.

Myspace is also another website that is utilized by many businesses and web promoters. As the grandfather to all social networking websites, Myspace was the former king of social media networks before Facebook exploded. Today, it’s popular with musicians and promoters who are targeting a younger market. Myspace tends to focus on the younger preteen market (Facebook traditionally catered to college kids and older), but it does have a feature that allows Twitter to update its feed automatically, but if you’re wanting to attract as many visitors to your site as you can, don’t discount the former king of social networks and create a Myspace page to promote your website.

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.