Over the last few years, nothing has grown as fast on the Internet as social networking websites. They provide a place for people to share their pictures, ideas, thoughts, stories, and favorites. And they can also be a very valuable source for business. Even celebrities, sports stars and politicians recognize the power of social networks for their own marketing purposes.

While it is true that posting about your website on social networks doesn't provide a standard "do-follow" backlink, there are still two major benefits to posting such links. First, Google regularly crawls many of the more prominent social networking websites and follows the links on them, which helps get your web pages found, cached, and indexed very quickly. Placing a link to one of your website pages on one of the more prominent social networks like Facebook, Twitter or Google+ can get that web page indexed by Google within an hour or two... sometimes in just minutes. If you have constructed your web pages correctly, optimizing meta tags and providing unique, high-quality content, the URL that you have bookmarked stands a very good chance of climbing the rankings.

Second, and more importantly, the exposure that these social networks provide can also bring direct traffic to your website. That exposure and immediate traffic can result in quite a few sales. We have had several websites that made their first sales within hours of being posted about on social networks. Don't get so caught up with the task of getting backlinks, backlinks and more backlinks that you forget about the prospect of generating actual traffic from the links themselves (you know, the human beings who see the links and actually click on them)!

The 5 most popular social networks at this time are:

1. Facebook
2. Twitter
3. LinkedIn
4. MySpace
5. Google+

There is very strong evidence that Google is now factoring in the number of friends (or followers) you have on the social networks that point to your website. This only makes sense. If a large number of people are interested in what you have to say, any link you provide will be seen by Google as something a large number of people may be interested in. That is why one of first things you should do when joining a social network is search that network for groups that might be interested in things on your website. Joining groups creates an instant group of followers. Finding groups that are at least semi-related to your micro niche is relatively easy. If your niche is dog houses, it is highly unlikely that there is a 'dog house' group (unless it is one formed by husbands who are in trouble with their wives). But there are bound to be a bunch of dog groups, animal lover groups, and pet groups that may be perfect for that niche.

Social networking websites are group-driven. They are structured in a way that makes it easy to quickly share information with a large group of people. You can almost think of social networking sites as a very slick, streamlined alternative to e-mail. If you wanted to, you could send out an e-mail to your entire address book. In the e-mail, you could request that they please forward the e-mail on to everyone in their address books and ask them to request the same thing of the recipients. In the "old days" (5 or 6 years ago), this is the primary means "gossip" and "personal updates" were shared.

Then social networking sites came along. They make it so much easier to rapidly share information with people. Now, instead of sending an e-mail to 300 people, you simply post on your Facebook wall. All 300 of your Facebook friends will see your message in their Facebook feeds. If they want to "forward" it to their friends, all they have to do is click the "Like" button and it shows up in their friends' feeds. It's a much faster and slicker and streamlined way to send messages to groups of people, who can then "re-share" it with different groups they're a part of.

When you post a message on a social networking site, the hope is that your group of friends/followers will find it interesting enough to turn around and share it with their friends/followers, who will share it with their friends/followers, and so on and so forth. You're hoping that, even if only on a small scale, the message will "go viral." That's only going to happen if the message you post is interesting or funny or useful or beneficial or noteworthy in some way. If it's not, it will probably never make it beyond your immediate group of friends/followers. And after several such messages, they may start to regret "friending" you in the first place!

Even though the big social networking sites are relatively similar, how you post on each site can be quite different. Below are the top 5 social networks along with information about the kind of posts you should make on them and tips on what kind of profile(s) you may choose to use with them. Regardless of which social network you post on, remember to always include your main keyword phrase in your post along with an LSI keyword or two if you can do so naturally.

Facebook

Facebook is one of the more "casual" social networks, so your posts there should be similar to what you would write to a friend. A typical post on Facebook would be similar to a meta description tag of a web page... just a little "folksier." A post about a new dog house website might say “I just created a brand new website for people looking for the perfect dog house. My store sells all kinds of dog houses, including wooden doghouses and the more modern vinyl dog houses. Please go check it out and let me know what you think!”

Facebook is one of the few social networks that has strict rules about multiple accounts. It is against Facebook's Terms of Service to have more than one account. When you set up an account on Facebook, you must elect whether it is a business account or a personal account. You are not allowed to have both; and once you decide, you will not be allowed to switch. Business accounts are quite restrictive. You are only allowed to create pages (which cannot be found when people do a search on Facebook) and run ad campaigns. You can't view user profiles or any content except the content you created. And perhaps most importantly, with a business account you can't send or receive friend requests. For all of these reasons, we highly recommend setting up a personal account (or just using your existing personal account) and using it to attract friends (and friends of friends of friends) to your website. If you want to post a longer piece like an article, you can create pages in your personal account just like a business can.

Twitter

Twitter is probably the very most "casual" of all the social networking sites. The thing you need to know about Twitter is that there is a very short 140-character limit on what you can post (that's why they're called "tweets"). You need to keep your post short and sweet and still leave room for a link (yes, even the link is counted in the number of characters you can tweet). This can be especially problematic (if not impossible) if you're linking to a page with a really long URL such as 'http://www.bestdoghouses.com/wooden-dog-houses/PetsRUS-Colonial-Style-Log-Cabin-Dog-House'. Fortunately, there are several free link-shortening services that will shorten long URLs into URLs less than 15 characters long using "301 redirects." We use bit.ly because it is made specifically for social networks like Twitter and is, in fact, what Twitter itself uses to post its own tweets!

Once you create a Twitter account, you can sign up for an account at bit.ly and link it to your Twitter account. Then, rather than tweeting from your actual Twitter account, you create them using the bit.ly interface. We recommend pasting the link URL into the posting box first, then clicking the 'Shorten' button, and then adding the rest of your tweet in front of and/or after the now-shortened URL so you can see how much space you really have.

Of necessity, your Twitter tweets will be much shorter than your Facebook posts. A tweet might be something like this: “Added a really cool new log cabin doghouse to my dog house website. (Now all I need is doggy beards.) Check it out! http://bit.ly/qVnkRL."

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a social network specifically made for business professionals. Not only is it a fantastic place to make contacts, but it is also a great place to link to your website(s) within your LinkedIn profile. Additionally, you can now use LinkedIn to post messages about your store/products just like you can do on the other social networks. Keep in mind that, because you are posting to business professionals, your posts should be a little more formal than those you post the other social networks. A typical post on LinkedIn might be: “We have just added a new log cabin style dog house to www.best-dog-houses.com that you might really like. It is honestly the most stylish dog house I've ever seen!”

MySpace

Like Facebook, MySpace is more on the casual side. One major difference, however, is that you can set up multiple accounts in MySpace. You can have a personal account and separate accounts for each and every website you own. You can set up your personal account however you like. Your website account(s), if you elect to go that way, should be set up much like you would the home page of a website. You can use pictures, videos, links and any other HTML-rich content that you would on a regular web page. There’s even a place for a separate blog on any MySpace account you set up.

Google+

Google+ is quite new and hasn't actually reached "top 5" status yet (officially), but we've included it here because, if we know anything about Google, we know that it's going to be very big and probably won't take very long to get there! Plus, it's Google so we're assuming that Google will pay close attention to it!

If you've already seen Google+, you'll know that it is pretty similar to Facebook in a lot of respects and your posts on Google+ will be very similar to those on Facebook. One big difference, however, is that Google+ allows you to divide up your friends into different "circles." So you can have a 'family' circle, a 'close friends' circle, a 'college friends' circle, a 'neighbors' cirlce, and so on. And then, rather than every post you make automatically going out to all friends, you can choose which circle(s) you want the message to be broadcast to. This feature can be really nice if you have multiple stores as you can create a unique cirlce relevant to each store and broadcast messages to only those friends. This saves you from having to create a separate Google+ account for each and every store.

Other Social Networking Sites

There are a slew of other social networks out there that you can become a part of. Some are very industry-specific and others are quite general. The top 5 we have mentioned here are quite adequate for most people but, don’t forget, the more places you post things about your website, the greater the chances are that somebody will click your link and actually buy! You can find other social networks by doing a Google search for 'top social networks'.

Using Your Personal Account vs. Creating a Separate Account

Facebook doesn't allow multiple accounts, so if you intend to abide by their Terms of Service you don't have much of a choice there. Also, the single vs. multiple accounts question isn't really an issue with Google+ and LinkedIn since both of those sites allow you to select which people/groups/circles you want to broadcast your posts to (it sure would be nice if all the social networks were this way). So we're really just talking about Twitter and MySpace here, which do allow you to create multiple accounts.

There are advantages and disadvantages of having multiple accounts. The main advantage of having a store-specific account is that you can target your posts to specific, relevant groups of people. The people interested in your posts about your left-handed golf clubs website probably aren't too interested in your posts about your new embroidered cloth baby diapers website. :) Having separate accounts for the two sites, if permitted, would solve this problem. The major disadvantage of having having separate accounts is that it will decrease the number of friends/followers for your posts (which Google seems to care about, as discussed above).

Only you can decide if it is best to open multiple accounts (if allowed) based on how you are or plan to use the accounts, how many stores you have (and whether they're related), and what kinds of posts you're making.