The use of social networks by consumers has grown phenomenally over this past year. It is getting harder to find friends and family who do not have a Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter account. As a business owner, you can capitalize on this social networking growth to bring traffic to your websites. While specifically addressing Facebook and to a lesser extend MySpace in the following paragraphs, successful social media marketing works similarly across any of the popular social networks today. If you can implement a sound plan, you can use social networking sites to drive traffic and help your business grow.

Facebook is the fastest growing social networking site at the moment, if you discount Twitter as a true social network as many do. There are thousands of new people signing up to Facebook every day. This growth in everyday users represents a huge market for you and your business. The most obvious advertising benefit of Facebook to most business owners is that you can hyper-target potential customers to effectively advertise pretty much anything. With Facebook demographics, provided by users at signup, your ability to target potential customers is more accurate than any other form of online mass advertising at present. Facebook also provides the ability to make your advertisements as eye catching as your imagination allows so that you are attracting the attention of the perfect customer. Facebook advertising is the most recognizable method of bringing traffic to your business.

MySpace can be another great social networking site to use for driving traffic to your business. While the MySpace of a few years ago was a place for your kids to hang out and chat about music, school and games, the MySpace of today is doing its best to adapt to the huge popularity of Facebook. You will find many of the features of Facebook showing up on MySpace. Hyper-targeting of ads is available. You can also utilize the MySpace application platform to develop incredibly viral advertising campaigns in nearly the same manner as with Facebook.

Both MySpace and Facebook can have a space in your social media war chest. The key is to put some effort in to planning your social media marketing. If you just log in and try to push traffic in a scatter shot approach, you will find that any social network will fail in driving you meaningful traffic. Do not expect to just build something and have everyone jump on your bandwagon. Viral campaigns require imagination, planning, and great execution.