Lucky for marketers, one of the best and least expensive ways to promote a business is by creating an internet presence with social media. To get the quickest return on the effort, there are certain tips to follow  which will be most effective.

First, choose the proper social network for what you are trying to accomplish. A photography business would most likely get the best response on Picasa or Facebook, and bloggers might choose a blogging system instead. The basic idea is to choose that social platform which contains your target market. Professional organizations and recruiters typically turn to LinkedIn, and there are lots of small industry segmented associations that have online forums where it is easy to interact with others that have the same interests. Likewise, you can also join Facebook groups in your areas of interest as well, since no one should ignore the 500 million users of the giant networking site or its little brother, Twitter.

Next, put together a short snippet about your services or your products that you can use to actively build your presence online and gain exposure. You will use that snippet to introduce yourself and your company on all of the sites you join for marketing purposes.

Now get busy interacting on these networking sites, participate in discussions, answer questions when you can, and take part in polls that are put up on the sites. Be sure to check out the sites daily or at least several times per week and update your posts, answer any messages or comments that have been left for you, and maybe add a link or relevant photo or article that you believe would be of interest to others on each particular site.

Build yourself a website dedicated entirely to your business and promote it shamelessly. Be absolutely certain that your website is filled with compelling and unique content so that people will come to your website to hear what you have to say about a topic.

After steady traffic is developed on the site, your users are regularly coming back to the site to see what is new, and would endorse a product or service that you offer; they might even purchase it themselves. At this point, your “conversion rate” is high, meaning a good number of people visiting your site are interested enough in you to make purchases from you. Be sure to regularly update your content to keep it fresh. Images and videos on your site help drive traffic, and also help drive your traffic to buy.

Use web 2.0 technologies along with social media to drastically improve your business quickly. Getting feedback from your readers is one of the best ways to know the reach of your website promotion. Polls, images and videos are easy ways to check out how much traffic your site is getting. Likewise, Facebook can track visitors and other statistics for you. Always read the feedback and comments, and tweak things until you’re completely satisfied.