How many people do you know that spend their lives tweeting, or hanging out on Facebook? If you take the time to check out the social networks now, you’ll find a lot of big business names like Ford advertising there, and for good reason. Social networking sites can help build your online business and your search engine ranking. So, how do you take advantage of this? Well, if you have money for advertising, then you can purchase click through ads on these kinds of sites; but there are other ways use social sites for business ranking.

The first and easiest way to promote yourself on a social networking site is to become a member and build up your list of friends. Once you have done this, and even before you do this, add the applications to your website that allow Facebook users, for example, to “like” your site. When someone does this, all of their friends will see their “like”, and hopefully check out your website. Adding these tools to your site will also positively affect your Google ratings, which is a good thing! Spending a few minutes making your site social will pay for itself over time, as your business ranking climbs and more traffic finds your site.

Once you have an active following on the social sites of your choice, be sure to let all your friends know when you add new features or information about your business to your site. Don’t spam the social sites! The quickest way to lose friends is to bomb everyone with sales pitches or affiliate sites. Have a page on your website for these programs, and put the link where people can find it, but your traffic should be directed to new information, articles, blog entries, or even funny movies or free games. Directing everyone straight to a duplicated pitch page isn’t going to get sales, and it will make the Google spiders, pandas and penguins very angry and you don’t want to make Google angry.

Using social sites for business ranking won’t cost you anything but time if you follow the advice above. The most important thing to remember is that quantity of content doesn’t help your ranking, quality of content does. If you develop a reputation on your various social sites for having a cool, interesting site with the newest YouTube video, or the coolest free games, or the most interesting blog, then the people who find your site will have a good reason to hit that button and let their friends know about it.

Will social sites bring you sales? Oh, yes! If people like coming to your site, and like who you are or they way you act on Facebook, for instance, when they do decide they want to try a specific program they’ve heard about, they’ll land on your site first. The best thing about social sites is people feel they know and like you, you are a “friend”. This puts you over half way to your goal of increasing sales, and it didn’t cost you anything!

Ludwing Hernandez, Social Media, and Creator of Mezee chat rooms.