One of the largest expenses and the most time-sucking activity you’ll ever experience as a business owner is marketing. Marketing will take up more time and money than any other activity that you do. Thankfully, today there are some low-cost ways to market your business and one of them is social media. However, you’ll still have a time component involved, even though it won’t cost a lot of money.

There are many different types of social media available to try your hand at social media marketing. Here is a partial list of the most popular:

* Facebook
* Twitter
* LinkedIn
* Google+
* Pinterest
* Yelp
* Foursquare
* YouTube

You can do a search for social media or social networking sites and find even more, but these are the most popular and the ones you might want to consider becoming active on. However, don’t automatically assume you need to be on every single social media network that exists. It would be impossible for anyone to spend enough time on them all to make it worth it. Be choosey before you get started and start small.

To choose the right social media to get started on, consider whether or not your target audience is there. You don’t want to join a network that has only competition or colleagues; you want to join a network that your target audience uses regularly. One way to discover new networks is to join Twitter and follow someone who is a direct competitor of yours. You can find out what networks they’re part of, and yes, copy them.

Once you choose some social networks to join, fill out your profiles completely. Whether you’re filling out a business profile or a personal profile be as complete as possible, and choose great pictures – including wonderful headshots. People like to see who they are conversing with and headshots are preferable over a logo any day. If you want your logo in there, consider getting a photograph with your logo as a backdrop.

When you’re filling out your profile, remember to use search terms that are relevant to local search. It’s important to use the words that people will use to find you. That means you should not leave out your business location information online. For instance, on your website, your local information and where people can find you should be on every single page. In your newsletters, your address should be on every single page. The location is very important when it comes to local search for obvious reasons.

On your social media networks it’s important to participate, share, and be human. By being human what we mean is that you should not focus only on selling. In fact, that should be a very small part of your content. Rather, you’ll want to talk in generalities about your business and the benefits of your business via sharing blog posts, customer testimonials, and some human elements about yourself and your staff. Remember, people like doing business with those whom they feel that they know.